US-Support for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat, Kobenhavn O

Investigators

Abstract

0301149 Lane This award provides five years of U.S. support for the Global Biological Information Facility (GBIF), a multilateral organization headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. GBIF is a coordinated international scientific effort to enable users throughout the world to discover and put to use vast quantities of global biodiversity data. GBIF will develop an interoperable network of biodiversity databases and related information technology tools. Near term GBIF developments will focus on species- and specimen-level data. Mid-term development will concentrate on expansion of content, additional improvements of search engines and tools to combine data from different sources. In the long term, GBIF will provide a portal that enables simultaneous queries against biodiversity, molecular, genetic, ecological and ecosystem level databases, which will facilitate and enable "data mining" of unprecedented utility and scientific merit.