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The general guidance is, and has always been, that handling bats should be avoided, particularly by the general public, but capturing and handling bats is often unavoidable for bat researchers. While bat researchers are aware of the potential for zoonotic pathogen transmission to occur when handling bats, most notably Rabies virus, some do not wear any (or insufficient) personal protective equipment (PPE) to reduce risks of exposure. This lack of adherence to even minimal biosafety practices may jeopardize both the safety of the bat and the handler. Such concerns became more pressing with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also had been raised as a result of previous outbreaks of human infections linked to contact with animals. The largely unknown potential for handled bats to become infected by a bat researcher, something not previously considered by most field workers, is now widely known in the research community due to the efforts of the IUCN SSC Bat Specialist Group and the Global Union of Bat Diversity Networks (GBatNet). It is also worth noting that the negative framing of bats during the pandemic may have serious consequences for bat conservation (Lopez-Baucells et al. 2017) and a refocusing of the conversation on the deficiencies of human interactions with bats would be a preferable direction. After all, bats are an important component of global ecosystems and provide many ecosystem services to humans (Kunz et al. 2011). Several bat-specific conservation groups have developed guidelines on how to safely handle bats to prevent anthropozoonotic transmission, including the IUCN SSC Bat Specialist Group (Nunez et al. 2020), the Bat Conservation Trust (Anonymous 2020), the Latin American and Caribbean Network for the Conservation of Bats (Suarez-Alvarez and Lopez-Berrizbeitia 2020) and Worksafe Queensland (Paterson 2016). These guidelines largely focus on the increased use of PPE, such as leather or nitrile/latex gloves, respirator masks, long sleeves and long trousers and protective eyewear or face shield, depending on the situation. These build on earlier PPE protocols deployed by some research groups to mitigate the risk of exposure to potential bat pathogens. Given the recent developments, we were interested to know if the use of PPE, in particular wearing gloves, has improved and whether we could detect a change by screening pictures of bats uploaded to iNaturalist. Clearly, it is not possible to evaluate the full adherance to bat handling guidlines, but we believe that use of gloves is a good indicator that best practices are being followed. iNaturalist is a mobile phone app for recording occurrences of wildlife and a social network for amateur and professional naturalists alike. It has about 100,000 to 300,000 active users and tens of thousands of observations of wildlife are recorded each day. On iNaturalist, most observations are evidenced by a picture of the organism. This allows the species to be identified, if possible, or verified by users who have the expertise, but also provides the context of the photograph as well. That context can show what the organism is doing, what developmental stage it is, what the habitat is or how it was photographed, such as whether a person is holding the organism. In our case, we wanted to verify whether people who were handling bats were wearing gloves and to determine whether there has recently been a change in behaviour (i.e. frequency of bat handlers wearing gloves).

There are an estimated 8.7 million eukaryotic species globally and knowledge of those organisms is organised about their scientific names and the specimens we have of those species (Sweetlove 2011, Mora et al. 2011). Likewise there are between 1.2 and 2.1 billion (109) specimens held in biodiversity collections globally (Ariño 2010). These collections constitute an infrastructure and scientific tool to understand, catalogue and study biodiversity. Yet we find it hard to answer the simple question, how many species are in a collection? This is not trivial to answer, collections are not completely inventoried, do not use the same taxonomy, and the volume of data is vast (Samy et al. 2013, Ariño 2010). We have developed a method that allows us to take a list of collections and to estimate the species richness contained within them. By doing this we will have a deeper insight into the scientific value of the world's biodiversity collections. Dealing with non-homogeneous and non-random, but incomplete, sampling of sites is a common issue that occurs in many ecological studies (Magurran and McGill 2011, Colwell et al. 2012, Gotelli and Colwell 2001). By using techniques and toolboxes, such as iNEXT (Chao et al. 2014b) and vegan (Oksanen et al. 2020) we can estimate species richness under these conditions. In the case of collections we consider not only the digitized and published proportion of preserved collections, but make extrapolations to the specimens that have not made their way to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) yet. Nevertheless, to calculate on such large datasets we need to employ innovative Big Data analytic tools. GBIF contains 1.8 billion observations that amount to 120 GB of data compressed. This can then be interrogated in the cloud or locally using tools such as Galaxy, which has made it possible to process large numbers of records in a single batch. We can now evaluate the biodiversity within collections, and divide the result by taxon and geographical region, and compare them to one another. Ultimately, this work will allow individual collections and consortia to evaluate their coverage of biodiversity and help them better target their collecting strategies.

The utopian vision is of a future where a digital representation of each object in our collections is accessible through the internet and sustainably linked to other digital resources. This is a long term goal however, and in the meantime there is an urgent need to share data about our collections at a higher level with a range of stakeholders (Woodburn et al. 2020). To sustainably achieve this, and to aggregate this information across all natural science collections, the data need to be standardised (Johnston and Robinson 2002). To this end, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Interest Group has developed a data standard for describing collections, which is approaching formal review for ratification as a new TDWG standard. It proposes 20 classes (Suppl. material 1) and over 100 properties that can be used to describe, categorise, quantify, link and track digital representations of natural science collections, from high-level approximations to detailed breakdowns depending on the purpose of a particular implementation. The wide range of use cases identified for representing collection description data means that a flexible approach to the standard and the underlying modelling concepts is essential. These are centered around the ‘ObjectGroup’ (Fig. 1), a class that may represent any group (of any size) of physical collection objects, which have one or more common characteristics. This generic definition of the ‘collection’ in ‘collection descriptions’ is an important factor in making the standard flexible enough to support the breadth of use cases. For any use case or implementation, only a subset of classes and properties within the standard are likely to be relevant. In some cases, this subset may have little overlap with those selected for other use cases. This additional need for flexibility means that very few classes and properties, representing the core concepts, are proposed to be mandatory. Metrics, facts and narratives are represented in a normalised structure using an extended MeasurementOrFact class, so that these can be user-defined rather than constrained to a set identified by the standard. Finally, rather than a rigid underlying data model as part of the normative standard, documentation will be developed to provide guidance on how the classes in the standard may be related and quantified according to relational, dimensional and graph-like models. So, in summary, the standard has, by design, been made flexible enough to be used in a number of different ways. The corresponding risk is that it could be used in ways that may not deliver what is needed in terms of outputs, manageability and interoperability with other resources of collection-level or object-level data. To mitigate this, it is key for any new implementer of the standard to establish how it should be used in that particular instance, and define any necessary constraints within the wider scope of the standard and model. This is the concept of the ‘collection description scheme,’ a profile that defines elements such as: which classes and properties should be included, which should be mandatory, and which should be repeatable; which controlled vocabularies and hierarchies should be used to make the data interoperable; how the collections should be broken down into individual ObjectGroups and interlinked, and how the various classes should be related to each other. which classes and properties should be included, which should be mandatory, and which should be repeatable; which controlled vocabularies and hierarchies should be used to make the data interoperable; how the collections should be broken down into individual ObjectGroups and interlinked, and how the various classes should be related to each other. Various factors might influence these decisions, including the types of information that are relevant to the use case, whether quantitative metrics need to be captured and aggregated across collection descriptions, and how many resources can be dedicated to amassing and maintaining the data. This process has particular relevance to the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) consortium, the design of which incorporates use cases for storing, interlinking and reporting on the collections of its member institutions. These include helping users of the European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) (Islam 2020) to discover specimens for physical and digital loans by providing descriptions and breakdowns of the collections of holding institutions, and monitoring digitisation progress across European collections through a dynamic Collections Digitisation Dashboard. In addition, DiSSCo will be part of a global collections data ecosystem requiring interoperation with other infrastructures such as the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Registry of Scientific Collections, the CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) Registry of Collections and Index Herbariorum. In this presentation, we will introduce the draft standard and discuss the process of defining new collection description schemes using the standard and data model, and focus on DiSSCo requirements as examples of real-world collection descriptions use cases.

The natural history specimens of the world have been documented on paper labels, often physically attached to the specimen itself. As we transcribe these data to make them digital and more useful for analysis, we make interpretations. Sometimes these interpretations are trivial, because the label is unambiguous, but often the meaning is not so clear, even if it is easily read. One key element that suffers from considerable ambiguity is people’s names. Though a person is indivisible, their name can change, is rarely unique and can be written in many ways. Yet knowing the people associated with data is incredibly useful. Data on people can be used to validate other data, simplify data capture, link together data across domains, reduce duplication-of-effort and facilitate data-gap-analysis. In addition, people data enable the discovery of individuals unique to our collections, the collective charting of the history of scientific researchers and the provision of credit to the people who deserve it (Groom et al. 2020). We foresee a future where the people associated with collections are not ambiguous, are shared globally, and data of all kinds are linked through the people who generate them. The TDWG People in Biodiversity Data Task Group is therefore working on a guide to the disambiguation of people in natural history collections. The ultimate goal is to connect the various strings of characters on specimen labels and other documentation to persistent identifiers (PIDs) that unambiguously link a name “string” to the identity of a person. In working towards this goal, 150 volunteers in the Bionomia project have linked 21 million specimens to persistent identifiers for their collectors and determiners. An additional 2 million specimens with links to identifiers for people have already emerged directly from collections that make use of the recently ratified Darwin Core terms recordedByID and identifiedByID. Furthermore, the CETAF Botany Pilot conducted among a group of European herbaria and museums has connected over 1.4 million specimens to disambiguated collectors (Güntsch et al. 2021). Still, given the estimated 2 billion (Ariño 2010) natural history specimens globally, there is much more disambiguation to be done. The process of disambiguation starts with a trigger, which is often the transcription of a specimen’s label data. Unambiguous identification of the collector may facilitate this transcription, as it offers knowledge of their biographical details and collecting habits, allowing us to infer missing information such as collecting date or locality. Another trigger might be the flagging of inconsistent data during data entry or resulting from data quality processes, revealing for instance that multiple collectors have been conflated. A disambiguation trigger is followed by the gathering of data, then the evaluation of the results and finally by the documentation of the new information. Disambiguation is not always straightforward and there are many pitfalls. It requires access to biographical data, and identifiers to be minted. In the case of living people, they have to cooperate with being disambiguated and we have to follow legal and ethical guidelines. In the case of dead people, particularly those long dead, disambiguation may require considerable research. We will present the progress made by the People in Biodiversity Data Task Group and their recommendations for disambiguation in collections. We want to encourage other institutions to engage with a global effort of linking people to persistent identifiers to collaboratively improve all collection data.

Domestic and captive animals and cultivated plants should be recognised as integral components in contemporary ecosystems. They interact with wild organisms through such mechanisms as hybridization, predation, herbivory, competition and disease transmission and, in many cases, define ecosystem properties. Nevertheless, it is widespread practice for data on domestic, captive and cultivated organisms to be excluded from biodiversity repositories, such as natural history collections. Furthermore, there is a lack of integration of data collected about biodiversity in disciplines, such as agriculture, veterinary science, epidemiology and invasion science. Discipline-specific data are often intentionally excluded from integrative databases in order to maintain the “purity” of data on natural processes. Rather than being beneficial, we argue that this practise of data exclusivity greatly limits the utility of discipline-specific data for applications ranging from agricultural pest management to invasion biology, infectious disease prevention and community ecology. This problem can be resolved by data providers using standards to indicate whether the observed organism is of wild or domestic origin and by integrating their data with other biodiversity data (e.g. in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). Doing so will enable efforts to integrate the full panorama of biodiversity knowledge across related disciplines to tackle pressing societal questions.

To support invasive alien species risk assessments, the Tracking Invasive Alien Species (TrIAS) project has developed an automated, open, workflow incorporating state-of-the-art species distribution modelling practices to create risk maps using the open source language R. It is based on Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) data and openly published environmental data layers characterizing climate and land cover. Our workflow requires only a species name and generates an ensemble of machine-learning algorithms (Random Forest, Boosted Regression Trees, K-Nearest Neighbors and AdaBoost) stacked together as a meta-model to produce the final risk map at 1 km2 resolution (Fig. 1). Risk maps are generated automatically for standard Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) greenhouse gas emission scenarios and are accompanied by maps illustrating the confidence of each individual prediction across space, thus enabling the intuitive visualization and understanding of how the confidence of the model varies across space and scenario (Fig. 2). The effects of sampling bias are accounted for by providing options to: use the sampling effort of the higher taxon the modelled species belongs to (e.g., vascular plants), and to thin species occurrences. use the sampling effort of the higher taxon the modelled species belongs to (e.g., vascular plants), and to thin species occurrences. The risk maps generated by our workflow are defensible and repeatable and provide forecasts of alien species distributions under further climate change scenarios. They can be used to support risk assessments and guide surveillance efforts on alien species in Europe. The detailied modeling framework and code are available on GitHub: https://github.com/trias-project.

Biodiversity data are being collected at unprecedented rates. Such data often have significant value for purposes beyond the initial reason for which they were collected, particularly when they are combined and collated with other data sources. In the field of invasion ecology, however, integrating data represents a major challenge due to the notorious lack of standardisation of terminologies and categorisations, and the application of deviating concepts of biological invasions. Here, we introduce the SInAS workflow, short for Standardising and Integrating Alien Species data. The SInAS workflow standardises terminologies following Darwin Core, location names using a proposed translation table, taxon names based on the GBIF backbone taxonomy, and dates of first records based on a set of predefined rules. The output of the SInAS workflow provides various entry points that can be used both to improve coherence among the databases and to check and correct the original data. The workflow is flexible and can be easily adapted and extended to the needs of different users. We illustrate the workflow using a case-study integrating five widely used global databases of information on biological invasions. The comparison of the standardised databases revealed a surprisingly low degree of overlap, which indicates that the amount of data may currently not be fully exploited in the original databases. We highly recommend the use and development of publicly available workflows to ensure that the integration of databases is reproducible and transparent. Workflows, such as SInAS, ultimately increase trust in data, study results, and conclusions EGB – Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (projects CGL2016-80820-R, PCIN2016-168 and RED2018‐102571‐T) and the Government of Catalonia (ref. 2017 SGR 548)

We compare different approaches to transcribing natural history data and summarise the advantages and disadvantages of each approach using six case studies from four different natural history collections. We summarise the main cost considerations when planning a transcription project and discuss the limitations we current have in understanding the costs behind transcription and data quality. Non

Pandemics, even more than other medical problems, require swift integration of knowledge. When caused by a new virus, understanding the underlying biology may help finding solutions. In a setting where there are a large number of loosely related projects and initiatives, we need common ground, also known as a “commons”. Wikidata, a public knowledge graph aligned with Wikipedia, is such a commons and uses unique identifiers to link knowledge in other knowledge bases However, Wikidata may not always have the right schema for the urgent questions. In this paper, we address this problem by showing how a data schema required for the integration can be modelled with entity schemas represented by Shape Expressions. As a telling example, we describe the process of aligning resources on the genomes and proteomes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and related viruses as well as how Shape Expressions can be defined for Wikidata to model the knowledge, helping others studying the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. How this model can be used to make data between various resources interoperable, is demonstrated by integrating data from NCBI Taxonomy, NCBI Genes, UniProt, and WikiPathways. Based on that model, a set of automated applications or bots were written for regular updates of these sources in Wikidata and added to a platform for automatically running these updates. Although this workflow is developed and applied in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, to demonstrate its broader applicability it was also applied to other human coronaviruses (MERS, SARS, Human Coronavirus NL63, Human coronavirus 229E, Human coronavirus HKU1, Human coronavirus OC4).

Aim To collect and identify the issues that may affect the future global and local management of biological invasions in the next 20 to 50 years and provide guidance for the prioritisation of actions and policies responding to the management challenges of the future. Location Global Methods We used an open online survey to poll specialists and stakeholders from around the world as to their opinion on the three most important future issues both globally and at their respective local working level. Results The 240 respondents identified 629 global issues that we categorised into topics. We summarised the highest rated topics into five broad thematic areas: (1) environmental change, particularly climate change, (2) the spread of species through trade, (3) public awareness, (4) the development of new technologies to enhance management, and (5) the need to strengthen policies. The respondents also identified 596 issues at their respective local working levels. Management, early detection, prevention and funding-related issues all ranked higher than at the global level. Our global audience of practitioners, policy makers and researchers also elicited topics not identified in horizon scanning exercises led by scientists including potential human health impacts, the need for better risk assessments and legislation, the role of human migration and water management. Main conclusions The topic areas identified in this horizon scan provide guidance where future policy priorities for invasive alien species should be set. First, to reduce the magnitude and speed of environmental change and its impacts on biological invasions; second, to restrict the movement of potentially invasive alien species via trade; third, to raise awareness with the general public and empower them to act; and finally, to invest in innovative technologies that can detect and mitigate adverse impacts of introduced species.

The digitization of herbaria and their online access will greatly facilitate access to plant collections around the world. This will improve the efficiency of taxonomy and help reduce inequalities between scientists. The Botanic Garden Meise, Belgium, is currently digitizing 1.2 million specimens including label data. In this paper we describe the user requirements analysis conducted for a new herbarium web portal. The aim was to identify the required functionality, but also to assist in the prioritization of software development and data acquisition. The Garden conducted the analysis in cooperation with Clockwork, the digital engagement agency of Ordina. Using a series of interactive interviews, potential users were consulted from universities, research institutions, science-policy initiatives and the Botanic Garden Meise. Although digital herbarium data have many potential stakeholders, we focused on the needs of taxonomists, ecologists and historians, who are currently the primary users of the Meise herbarium data portal. The three categories of user have similar needs, all wanted as much specimen data as possible, and for those data, to be interlinked with other digital resources within and outside the Garden. Many users wanted an interactive system that they could comment on, or correct online, particularly if such corrections and annotations could be used to rank the reliability of data. Many requirements depend on the quality of the digitized data associated with each specimen. The essential data fields are the taxonomic name; geographic location; country; collection date; collector name and collection number. Also all researchers valued linkage between biodiversity literature and specimens. Nevertheless, to verify digitized data the researchers still want access to high quality images, even if fully transcribed label information is provided. The only major point of disagreement is the level of access users should have and what they should be allowed to do with the data and images. Not all of the user requirements are feasible given the current technical and regulatory landscape, however, the potential of these suggestions is discussed. Currently, there is no off-the-shelf solution to satisfy all these user requirements, but the intention of this paper is to guide other herbaria who are prioritising their investment in digitization and online web functionality., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The present paper describes policies and guidelines for scholarly publishing of biodiversity and biodiversity-related data, elaborated and updated during the Framework Program 7 EU BON project, on the basis of an earlier version published on Pensoft's website in 2011. The document discusses some general concepts, including a definition of datasets, incentives to publish data and licenses for data publishing. Further, it defines and compares several routes for data publishing, namely as (1) supplementary files to research articles, which may be made available directly by the publisher, or (2) published in a specialized open data repository with a link to it from the research article, or (3) as a data paper, i.e., a specific, stand-alone publication describing a particular dataset or a collection of datasets, or (4) integrated narrative and data publishing through online import/download of data into/from manuscripts, as provided by the Biodiversity Data Journal. The paper also contains detailed instructions on how to prepare and peer review data intended for publication, listed under the Guidelines for Authors and Reviewers, respectively. Special attention is given to existing standards, protocols and tools to facilitate data publishing, such as the Integrated Publishing Toolkit of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF IPT) and the DarwinCore Archive (DwC-A). A separate section describes most leading data hosting/indexing infrastructures and repositories for biodiversity and ecological data.

Citizen science is an approach of public participation in scientific research which has gained significant momentum in recent years. This is particularly evident in biology and environmental sciences where input from citizen scientists has greatly increased the number of publicly available observation data. However, there are still challenges in effective networking, data sharing and securing data quality. EU BON project has analyzed the citizen science landscape in Europe with regards to biodiversity research and proposes several policy recommendations. One of the recommendations is a Pan-European citizen science gateway for biodiversity data with dedicated tools for data collection and management. The prototypes of the gateway components are part of the EU BON biodiversity portal and described in current report.

One of the most important issues for controlling the spread of invasive species is public awareness (Dehnen-Schmutz et al. 2018). Passively, the public are responsible for the spread of invasive species, for example by moving dirty boats from one water body to another. But they also actively spread invasive species by releasing them in the wild. The spread of some invasive species could be slowed or even halted if the general public were more aware of the risks. Furthermore, this is a global issue, not restricted to one country or language, and hence needs to be tackled at an international level. The Convention on Biological Diversity has a specific target to identify pathways of introduction and manage invasive species (Convention on Biological Diversity 2014). As part of this awareness-raising, the public needs information on how to identify invasive species, as well as how to know their regulatory status, distribution and transmission. They also need to be aware of how invasive species impact biodiversity, ecosystem services and health. This information needs to be up-to-date, reliable and unbiased, but also supported by evidence. Many information platforms exist on invasive species and new information is being generated all the time on this dynamic issue. However, pre-eminent among information sources on the internet is Wikipedia. Consistently ranked in the top ten of most visited websites, with more than 15 billion page views a month across 300 language editions, it is the go-to website on many subjects (Wikimedia 2019). Invasive species such as the zebra mussel and water hyacinth receive over 500 daily page views, just on the English edition alone. Wikipedia is arguably one of the largest citizen science projects, containing information on every area of science and connecting, through its citations, scientific literature with the general public. Wikipedia has been criticized about many aspects of its content and editorship, including its quality and neutrality (Kumar et al. 2016, Wagner et al. 2016, Hargittai and Shaw 2014). Nevertheless, its dominance in the provision of information cannot be ignored and addressing Wikipedia's problems by direct engagement might be more productive than ignoring it. Increasingly, different disciplines are engaging with Wikipedia for communication, recognizing that it can be a productive communication channel (Murray 2018). Invasive species are a global problem and tackling them is a global issue. We have been investigating the current status of invasive species information on Wikipedia, whether it contains relevant information on impacts and control, and whether the information is consistent across different language versions. We will present what we have found and make recommendations on what to improve and how we can engage with Wikipedia.

The LinBi project aims to enhance the discoverability of digitized objects from natural history collections hosted by institutes all over Europe. This enhancement is achieved by publishing new and enriched content to the Europeana collections platform. The use of simple vocabularies and machine-readable metadata encourages reuse and has the additional advantage of facilitating the clustering of interesting content for user groups beyond biodiversity and natural history researchers. Linking the collections of Europe together in an openly-available platform and sharing our common cultural and natural heritage with a broad audience will increase the public’s awareness of biodiversity collections. Furthermore, it will help us reach out to new user groups such as teachers, journalists and artists, who were previously unaware of, or distant from, our collections. Suitable content was selected and harmonized for interlinking with Europeana. Contributions include a large quantity of herbarium sheets, digitized glass plate negatives taken between 1880 and 1930 and a portrait collection dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. With the help of the DoeDat crowdsourcing platform, existing metadata were enriched and mobilized to allow for publication in the form of open linked data. The integration of geographical data and common names allows the Europeana platform to link scientific specimens with literature and fine art from different collections and to guide users to interesting and inspiring content via themed virtual exhibitions. One such theme is composed of content from the "Wild Roses of Crépin" collection, which will be enriched by pictures of living plants, herbarium specimens and illustrations old and modern. A second content cluster consists of an enriched and curated collection of botanical illustrations originating from a corpus of special and rare books ranging from the 15th to 19th centuries. Careful curation increases the potential for re-use and provides additional oppertunities for the general public to interact with this collection. The LinBi platform has the long-term ambition of forming a sustainable and open source solution integrated into the Europeana Core Service. This will further improve cooperation between institutes by building international infrastructure and networks, thus contributing to a more open cross-border society.

When researchers and managers are asked to rank the issues that prevent adequate control of invasive species, lack of public awareness is at the top of the list (Dehnen‐Schmutz et al. 2018). It is therefore imperative to raise the general public's awareness of the potential risks of introducing alien species into the wild. Green Pioneers, a citizen science project funded by the Flemish Government, (Fig. 1) aims to address this issue in Belgium, across age groups. The project aims to Create awareness on invasive species, highlighting how invasions can be avoided and how to mitigate their impact. Improve communication between citizens and scientists on conservation and invasive plant species. Augment the quality and quantity of data on invasive species. Create awareness on invasive species, highlighting how invasions can be avoided and how to mitigate their impact. Improve communication between citizens and scientists on conservation and invasive plant species. Augment the quality and quantity of data on invasive species. The project is developing three kinds of activity, specifically to attract a broad demographic: - 'Young Pioneers', by developing tools for teachers in science, technology, engineering and mathemathics for school children from 12-15 years old. - 'Online Pioneers', through our online citizen science platform DoeDat.be, by helping with the transcription of label information on herbarium specimens, - and 'Visiteers', by inviting companies and working age people to help us in the collection and to inform them about invasive species. Finally, we will be organizing a BioBlitz in spring 2020 at Meise Botanic Garden where we will celebrate plants and all our Green Pioneers, while also spreading the message of invasive plant awareness. During our 48 hour BioBlitz, scientists, volunteers and citizens are workig together to survey the biodiversity of our Botanic Garden. Ultimately, Green Pioneers aim to encourage recording of alien species by amateur botanists and create a generation of responsible gardeners who understand the consequences of releasing invasive alien plants into the wild.

Natural history collections represent a vast and superb wealth of information gathered and curated across centuries by institutions such as natural history museums and botanical gardens around the world. The relatively recent advent and maturation of accessible computer technology has allowed the initiation of major digitization projects aimed at making the contents of these collections publicly available for education and research purposes. The final destinations of these newly digitized data are public biodiversity data repositories, of which, GBIF is the main one. These respositories are gateways where researchers can access and retrieve the data for use in a wide range of analyses. This unprecedented volume of information on biodiversity represents an extraordinary asset for research in ecology and evolution. A particularly important part of the digitized data for any given specimen is its collection location, as it indirectly gives information on the species’ habitat and thus, its ecological requirements. Many specimens in natural history collections come from a time where the collecting event, which includes the location information, was hand-written on physical tags attached to the specimen. This location information was given as a description of a place, e.g. a site name, and could be a rather precise or vague description. In order to convert this description of locality into a digitized research-grade georeferenced record, the research community has come up with a set of guidelines and recommendations; the most prominent one the point-radius method devised by Wieczorek et al. in 2004. However, and despite the public availability of this know-how, the end result is that the data available at the end of the pipeline, e.g. GBIF, often lacks georeferencing information with enough quality to be used for research purposes. Occurrence records from natural history collection datasets held at GBIF, often lack spatial coordinates and, if present, in most cases their precision and uncertainty fields are blank. The final consequence of this lack of complete georeferencing information is that the affected records are rendered useless for many kinds of research. For example, the flourishing field of species distribution modelling absolutely depends on accurate spatial information in order to be able to retrieve information on the environmental conditions in which the species live. The availability of global environmental and remote sensing datasets together with the sophisticated geospatial tools at the disposal of the researcher become powerless if no quality geoinformation is available. In this study, we perform a preliminary analysis on the status and availability of geoferencing information in datasets originated from specimens in natural history collections held at GBIF, discuss how the quality of this spatial info may affect ecological research, and conclude with some recommendations on how to better describe the georeferencing process within public digital biodiversity repositories.

Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) a pan-European Research Infrastructure will facilitate the production of tens of millions of digital images of natural history specimens each year. The labels of these specimens contain valuable information for research, but their transcription can be difficult and time-consuming, with often hard to read handwritten labels. Whilst accurate label transcription is only one step along the way to create a specimen record fit for different research uses, it is an extremely important one. It would be very time-consuming to have to return to recheck label information for even a very small proportion of specimens. Once a specimen label is transcribed correctly, it becomes much easier to enhance the record with additional information from other sources, e.g. from literature or collector itineraries. It also becomes feasible to determine the point of collection from the textual information on the label by a process known as georeferencing, or even to find inaccuracies within the label itself. Under the auspices of the project Innovation and Consolidation for Large Scale Digitisation of Natural Heritage (ICEDIG), we compared different manual approaches to transcription of collection labels. Using herbarium specimens as an example, the quality of transcribed data by: in-house trained institute staff, outsourcing to a commercial company or transcription by the general public through online crowdsourcing platforms was compared through two transcription pilots. in-house trained institute staff, outsourcing to a commercial company or transcription by the general public through online crowdsourcing platforms was compared through two transcription pilots. The first pilot consisted of 200 Solanum specimen images from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the UK and 200 from Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium. This particular genus was chosen as both institutes had specimens from which the label data had already been transcribed through the digitisation company Picturae, completed by Alembo. The Kew specimens had also been transcribed in-house by staff employed as digitisation officers or curators and by an independant researcher. The images from both institutes were uploaded to two crowdsourcing platforms: DigiVol and DoeDat. In a second pilot, multiple European institutions holding botanical collections were approached to provide a sample of 200 digitally imaged herbarium sheet specimens to upload to multiple crowdsourcing platforms. Specimens from 7 institutions were uploaded for transcription to 5 different crowdsourcing platforms: DigiVol, DoeDat, Die Herbonauten, Les Herbonautes and Notes from Nature. For both pilots, key transcription data were assessed and common errors in label transcription identified. Reasons for these errors will be discussed along with possible mechanisms to improve the accuracy of the transcriptions. The need for standards for transcription is identified and recommendations made.

There are more than 1.2 billion biological specimens in the world’s museums and herbaria. These objects are particularly important forms of biological sample and observation. They underpin biological taxonomy but the data they contain have many other uses in the biological and environmental sciences. Nevertheless, from their conception they are almost entirely documented on paper, either as labels attached to the specimens or in catalogues linked with catalogue numbers. In order to make the best use of these data and to improve the findability of these specimens, these data must be transcribed digitally and made to conform to standards, so that these data are also interoperable and reusable. Through various digitization projects, the authors have experimented with transcription by volunteers, expert technicians, scientists, commercial transcription services and automated systems. We have also been consumers of specimen data for taxonomical, biogeographical and ecological research. In this paper, we draw from our experiences to make specific recommendations to improve transcription data. The paper is split into two sections. We first address issues related to database implementation with relevance to data transcription, namely versioning, annotation, unknown and incomplete data and issues related to language. We then focus on particular data types that are relevant to biological collection specimens, namely nomenclature, dates, geography, collector numbers and uniquely identifying people. We make recommendations to standards organizations, software developers, data scientists and transcribers to improve these data with the specific aim of improving interoperability between collection datasets.

The rapid development and refinement of digital technologies in the last two decades has spearheaded a wave of digitization in natural history collections. This has generated a massive number of digitized images and many more are expected with the planned European Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) infrastructure. Many of these images will contain labels with data written on them, typed on them or interpretable from them, but capturing these data remains a challenge. Automated as well as manual methods are being investigated and have yielded mixed results. In addition, previously captured data or data to be captured this way will need to be interoperable in order to make digital access and enrichment most effective. Finally, institutions holding the physical specimens will need to remain capable of efficiently curating the digital, potentially annotated, counterparts. This will require compatibility with the diverse data models of local Collection Management Systems (CMS). In the context of the ICEDIG (Innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage) project, a benchmark dataset of herbarium specimens was assembled from nine contributing institutions (Dillen et al. 2019). This dataset was used to evaluate automated methods of text recognition, such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition), and post-capture classification, such as language identification or NER (Named Entity Recognition). A pipeline from scan to scientifically useful data was drafted and guidelines for selecting appropriate software solutions were provided. The benchmark dataset was also processed through multiple crowdsourcing platforms, after which the quality and interoperability of the resulting transcriptions was analyzed. The aptitude of local Collection Management Systems to curate these digitized specimens efficiently was investigated, as well as the fitness of data standards in use to ensure and maintain proper interoperability. In addition, available surveys on CMS use and satisfaction were summarized and in-depth assessments of the CMS in use at the ICEDIG partner institutes were performed. A summary of results and recommendations will be presented.

In a world where invasive alien species (IAS) are recognised as one of the major threats to biodiversity, leading scientists from five continents have come together to propose the concept of developing an international association for open knowledge and open data on IAS—termed “INVASIVESNET”. This new association will facilitate greater understanding and improved management of invasive alien species (IAS) and biological invasions globally, by developing a sustainable network of networks for effective knowledge exchange. In addition to their inclusion in the CBD Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, the increasing ecological, social, cultural and economic impacts associated with IAS have driven the development of multiple legal instruments and policies. This increases the need for greater co-ordination, co-operation, and information exchange among scientists, management, the community of practice and the public. INVASIVESNET will be formed by linking new and existing networks of interested stakeholders including international and national expert working groups and initiatives, individual scientists, database managers, thematic open access journals, environmental agencies, practitioners, managers, industry, non-government organisations, citizens and educational bodies. The association will develop technical tools and cyberinfrastructure for the collection, management and dissemination of data and information on IAS; create an effective communication platform for global stakeholders; and promote coordination and collaboration through international meetings, workshops, education, training and outreach. To date, the sustainability of many strategic national and international initiatives on IAS have unfortunately been hampered by time-limited grants or funding cycles. Recognising that IAS initiatives need to be globally coordinated and on-going, we aim to develop a sustainable knowledge sharing association to connect the outputs of IAS research and to inform the consequential management and societal challenges arising from IAS introductions. INVASIVESNET will provide a dynamic and enduring network of networks to ensure the continuity of connections among the IAS community of practice, science and management.

The digitization of biocollections is a critical task with direct implications for the global community who use the data for research and education. Recent innovations to involve citizen scientists in digitization increase awareness of the value of biodiversity specimens; advance science, technology, engineering, and math literacy; and build sustainability for digitization. In support of these activities, we launched the first global citizen-science event focused on the digitization of biodiversity specimens: Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio). During the inaugural 2015 event, 21 sites hosted events where citizen scientists transcribed specimen labels via online platforms (DigiVol, Les Herbonautes, Notes from Nature, the Smithsonian Institution's Transcription Center, and Symbiota). Many citizen scientists also contributed off-site. In total, thousands of citizen scientists around the world completed over 50,000 transcription tasks. Here, we present the process of organizing an international citizen-science event, an analysis of the event's effectiveness, and future directions—content now foundational to the growing WeDigBio event.

Globally there are a number of citizen science portals to support digitisation of biodiversity collections. Digitisation not only involves imaging of the specimen itself, but also includes the digital transcription of label and ledger data, georeferencing and linking to other digital resources. Making use of the skills and enthusiasm of volunteers is potentially a good way to reduce the great backlog of specimens to be digitised. These citizen science portals engage the public and are liberating data that would otherwise remain on paper. There is also considerable scope for expansion into other countries and languages. Therefore, should we continue to expand? Volunteers give their time for free, but the creation and maintenance of the platform is not without costs. Given a finite budget, what can you get for your money? How does the quality compare with other methods? Is crowdsourcing of label transcription faster, better and cheaper than other forms of transcription system? We will summarize the use of volunteer transcription from our own experience and the reports of other projects. We will make our evaluation based on the costs, speed and quality of the systems and reach conclusions on why you should or should not use this method.

There is no sign of saturation in accumulation of alien species (AS) introductions worldwide, additionally the rate of spread for some species has also been shown to be increasing. However, the challenges of gathering information on AS are recognized. Recent developments in citizen science (CS) provide an opportunity to improve data flow and knowledge on AS while ensuring effective and high quality societal engagement with the issue of IAS (Invasive Alien Species). Advances in technology, particularly on-line recording and smartphone apps, along with the development of social media, have revolutionized CS and increased connectivity while new and innovative analysis techniques are emerging to ensure appropriate management, visualization, interpretation and use and sharing of the data. In early July 2018 we launched a European CO-operation in Science and Technology (COST) Action to address multidisciplinary research questions in relation to developing and implementing CS, advancing scientific understanding of AS dynamics while informing decision-making specifically implementation of technical requirements of relevant legislation such as the EU Regulation 1143/2014 on IAS. It will also support the EU biodiversity goals and embedding science within society. The Action will explore and document approaches to establishing a European-wide CS AS network. It will embrace relevant innovations for data gathering and reporting to support the implementation of monitoring and surveillance measures, while ensuring benefits for society and citizens, through an AS CS European network. The Action will, therefore, increase levels of participation and quality of engagement with current CS initiatives, ensuring and evaluating educational value, and improve the value outcomes for potential users including citizens, scientists, alien species managers, policy-makers, local authorities, industry and other stakeholders., peer-reviewed

Specimen labels are written in numerous languages and accurate interpretation requires local knowledge of place names, vernacular names and people’s names. In many countries more than one language is in common usage. Belgium, for example, has three official languages. Crowdsourcing has helped many collections digitize their labels and generates useful data for science. Furthermore, direct engagement of the public with a herbarium increases the collection’s visibility and potentially reinforces a sense of common ownership. For these reasons we built DoeDat, a multilingual crowdsourcing platform forked from Digivol of the Australian Museum (Figs 1, 2). Some of the useful features we inherited from Digivol include a georeferencing tool, configurable templates, simple project management and individual institutional branding. Running a multilingual website does increase the work needed to setup and manage projects, but we hope to gain from the broader engagement we can attract. Currently, we are focusing our work on Belgian collections were Dutch and French are the primary languages, but in the future we may expand our languages when we work on our international collections. We also hope that we can eventually merge our code with that of Digivol, so that we can both benefit from each other's developments.

With biodiversity research activities being increasingly shifted to the web, the need for a system of persistent and stable identifiers for physical collection objects becomes increasingly pressing. The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities agreed on a common system of HTTP-URI-based stable identifiers which is now rolled out to its member organizations. The system follows Linked Open Data principles and implements redirection mechanisms to human-readable and machine-readable representations of specimens facilitating seamless integration into the growing semantic web. The implementation of stable identifiers across collection organizations is supported with open source provider software scripts, best practices documentations and recommendations for RDF metadata elements facilitating harmonized access to collection information in web portals. Database URL : http://cetaf.org/cetaf-stable-identifiers.

New technologies such as smartphone application software (apps) are increasingly used to reach a wider audience on the subject of invasive alien species (IAS) and to involve the public in recording them. In this paper we present two of the more recent smartphone applications for IAS recording in northwest Europe, the RINSE That’s Invasive! app and the KORINA app. We present an overview of available smartphone apps for IAS recording in Europe and address issues of data integration, data openness, data quality, data harmonisation and databaseinteroperability. Finally, we make some recommendations for future app design. New technologies such as smartphone application software (apps) are increasingly used to reach a wider audience on the subject of invasive alien species (IAS) and to involve the public in recording them. In this paper we present two of the more recent smartphone applications for IAS recording in northwest Europe, the RINSE That’s Invasive! app and the KORINA app. We present an overview of available smartphone apps for IAS recording in Europe and address issues of data integration, data openness, data quality, data harmonisation and databaseinteroperability. Finally, we make some recommendations for future app design.

Imagine a future where dynamically, from year to year, we can track the progression of alien species (AS), identify emerging problem species, assess their current and future risk and timely inform policy in a seamless data-driven workflow. One that is built on open science and open data infrastructures. By using international biodiversity standards and facilities, we would ensure interoperability, repeatability and sustainability. This would make the process adaptable to future requirements in an evolving AS policy landscape both locally and internationally. In recent years, Belgium has developed decision support tools to inform invasive alien species (IAS) policy, including information systems, early warning initiatives and risk assessment protocols. However, the current workflows from biodiversity observations to IAS science and policy are slow, not easily repeatable, and their scope is often taxonomically, spatially and temporally limited. This is mainly caused by the diversity of actors involved and the closed, fragmented nature of the sources of these biodiversity data, which leads to considerable knowledge gaps for IAS research and policy. We will leverage expertise and knowledge from nine former and current BELSPO projects and initiatives: Alien Alert, Invaxen, Diars, INPLANBEL, Alien Impact, Ensis, CORDEX.be, Speedy and the Belgian Biodiversity Platform. The project will be built on two components: 1) The establishment of a data mobilization framework for AS data from diverse data sources and 2) the development of data-driven procedures for risk evaluation based on risk modelling, risk mapping and risk assessment. We will use facilities from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), standards from the Biodiversity Information Standards organization (TDWG) and expertise from Lifewatch to create and facilitate a systematic workflow. Alien species data will be gathered from a large set of regional, national and international initiatives, including citizen science with a wide taxonomic scope from marine, terrestrial and freshwater environments. Observation data will be funnelled in repeatable ways to GBIF. In parallel, a Belgian checklist of AS will be established, benefiting from various taxonomic and project-based checklists foreseen for GBIF publication. The combination of the observation data and the checklist will feed indicators for the identification of emerging species; their level of invasion in Belgium; changes in their invasion status and the identification of areas and species of concern that could be impacted upon by bioinvasions. Data-driven risk evaluation of identified emerging species will be supported by niche and climate modelling and consequent risk mapping using critical climatic variables for the current and projected future climate periods at high resolution. The resulting risk maps will complement risk assessments performed with the recently developed Harmonia+ protocol to assess risks posed by emergent species to biodiversity and human, plant, and animal health. The use of open data will ensure that interested stakeholders in Belgium and abroad can make use of the information we generate. The open science ensures everyone is free to adopt and adapt the workflow for different scenarios and regions. The checklist will be used at national level, but will also serve as the Belgian reference for international databases (IUCN - GRIIS, EASIN) and impact assessments (IPBES, SEBI). The workflow will be showcased through GEO BON, the Invasivesnet network and the COST Actions Alien Challenge and ParrotNet. The observations and outcomes of risk evaluations will be used to provide science-based support for the implementation of IAS policies at the regional, federal and EU levels. The publication of Belgian data and checklists on IAS is particularly timely in light of the currently ongoing EU IAS Regulation and its implementation in Belgium. By proving that automated workflows can provide rapid and repeatable production of information, we will open up this technology for other conservation assessments.

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are measurements required for study, reporting, and management of biodiversity change. They are being developed to support consistency, from the collection to the reporting of biodiversity data at the national, regional and global scales. However, "EBV stakeholders" need to strike a balance between 'doing innovative research' and 'having positive impact' on biodiversity management decisions. This paper reports on a workshop entitled Identifying joint pathways to address the challenges of biodiversity data provision and decision-making and presents the main workshop’s output, a “researcher’s brief” entitled Guiding principles for promoting the application of EBVs for current and future needs of decision-makers. These guiding principles are: Speak with a common voice; Clearly define what is an EBV and how it relates to indicators; Engage beyond the research world; Be realistic about what can be done now and later; Define criteria for good EBVs; Use EBV as a clearing house; Convey the limitations of EBVs; Clarify what impact EBVs should have; Be salient, credible, legitimate, iterative; Don't put an EBV skin on everything you do; Don't create too many EBVs; and Don't reduce EBVs to building blocks of indicators. This brief is of relevance to the wider GEO BON (Group on Earth Observation Biodoversity Observation Network) community, and in particular those scientists/researchers interested in the application of EBVs., published version, nonPeerReviewed

Science-based strategies to tackle biological invasions depend on recent, accurate, well-documented, standardized and openly accessible information on alien species. Currently and historically, biodiversity data are scattered in numerous disconnected data silos that lack interoperability. The situation is no different for alien species data, and this obstructs efficient retrieval, combination, and use of these kinds of information for research and policy-making. Standardization and interoperability are particularly important as many alien species related research and policy activities require pooling data. We describe seven ways that data on alien species can be made more accessible and useful, based on the results of a European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) workshop: (1) Create data management plans; (2) Increase interoperability of information sources; (3) Document data through metadata; (4) Format data using existing standards; (5) Adopt controlled vocabularies; (6) Increase data availability; and (7) Ensure long-term data preservation. We identify four properties specific and integral to alien species data (species status, introduction pathway, degree of establishment, and impact mechanism) that are either missing from existing data standards or lack a recommended controlled vocabulary. Improved access to accurate, real-time and historical data will repay the long-term investment in data management infrastructure, by providing more accurate, timely and realistic assessments and analyses. If we improve core biodiversity data standards by developing their relevance to alien species, it will allow the automation of common activities regarding data processing in support of environmental policy. Furthermore, we call for considerable effort to maintain, update, standardize, archive, and aggregate datasets, to ensure proper valorization of alien species data and information before they become obsolete or lost.

2nd Freshwater Invasives - Networking for Strategy II (FINS-II) Conference -- JUL 11-14, 2016 -- Zagreb, CROATIA Skora, Michal Edward/0000-0002-9121-1318; Groom, Quentin/0000-0002-0596-5376; Lukas, Juliane/0000-0003-3336-847X; Skora, Michal/0000-0002-9121-1318; Piria, Marina/0000-0001-6324-9282; Smith, Emily/0000-0003-2767-9933; Simonovic, Predrag/0000-0002-4819-4962; Pastorino, Paolo/0000-0002-0585-1168; Koutsikos, Nicholas/0000-0003-0680-4504; Vilizzi, Lorenzo/0000-0001-8103-885X; Dobrzycka-Krahel, Aldona/0000-0002-4252-895X; Tarkan, Ali Serhan/0000-0001-8628-0514 WOS: 000412582000002 Invasive alien species (IAS) are a significant and growing problem worldwide. In Europe, some aspects of IAS have been addressed through existing legal instruments, but these are far from sufficient to tackle the problem comprehensively. The FINS II Conference considered the relevance of Top 20 IAS issues (Top 10 threats and opportunities) for Europe determined at the 1st Freshwater Invasiveness-Networking for Strategy (FINS I) conference held in Ireland in 2013. Using a similar format of sequential group voting, threats from FINS I (lack of funding, of awareness and education; poor communication) and several new threats (lack of lead agencies, of standardized management and of common approach; insufficient monitoring and management on private property) were identified by 80 academics, applied scientists, policy makers and stakeholders from 14 EU and three non-EU countries (including 10 invited speakers) during four workshop break-out sessions (legislation remit in both EU/non-EU countries; best management and biosecurity practice for control; data management and early warning; pathways of introductions and citizen science). Identified opportunities include improved cooperation and communication, education and leadership to enhance public awareness and stakeholder participation, systems establishment for early detection, rapid response, monitoring and management of IAS using standardised methods of data collection, storage and usage. The sets of threats and opportunities identified underline the importance of international cooperation on IAS issues in communication, education and funding as priorities, as well as in standardization of legislation, control methods and best practise of research. Univ Zagreb, European Inland Fisheries & Aquaculture Advisory Commiss University of Zagreb, Faculty of Agriculture; European Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Commission (EIFAAC); Croatian Biological Society; Ministry of Science; Education and Sport of Republic of Croatia; Croatian Association of Sports Fishing Societies; Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Nature Conservation Committee [NEC04932]; Natural Environment Research CouncilNERC Natural Environment Research Council [NEC04932]; UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural AffairsDepartment for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA); Irish EPA project "Prevention, control and eradication of invasive alien species" [2015-NC-MS-4]; Topfishing; Zagreb ZOO; Zagreb; Karlovac towns We wish to thank the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Agriculture, the European Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Commission (EIFAAC), the Croatian Biological Society, the Ministry of Science, the Education and Sport of Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Association of Sports Fishing Societies, the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Topfishing, Zagreb ZOO, Zagreb and Karlovac towns for sponsoring the FINS II conference. We also thank the large number of people who assisted but are not co-authors on the manuscript including M. Pofuk, T. Stuhne, R. Jasarevic, K. Culag, I. Cuze, M. Cvitanic and S. Hudina for their selfless assistance during the conference. H.E. Roy received support from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and the Natural Environment Research Council (via National Capability funding to the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, project NEC04932), and G.H. Copp was supported by the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. COST Action TD1209 ALIEN Challenge is acknowledged. F. Lucy, J. Caffrey, J. Dick, E. Davis and N. Coughlan were supported by the Irish EPA project "Prevention, control and eradication of invasive alien species" (2015-NC-MS-4).

International audience; 1. There is a high demand for biodiversity observation data to inform conservation and environmental policy, and citizen scientists generate the vast majority of terrestrial biodiversity observations. As this work is voluntary, many people assume that these data are openly available for use in conservation and scientific research.2. Here, the openness of biodiversity observation data that are contributed to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility is examined by the data provider. Contrary to what many people assume, data sets from volunteers are among the most restrictive in how they can be used.3. Policy implications. The assumption that voluntary data collection leads to data sharing does not recognize the wishes and motivations of those who collect data, nor does it respect the crucial contributions of these data to long‐term monitoring of biodiversity trends. To improve data openness, citizen scientists should be recognized in ways that correspond with their motivations. Furthermore, organizations that manage these data should make their data sharing policies open and explicit.

There are a multitude of biodiversity informatics projects, datasets, databases and initiatives at the global level, and many more at regional, national, and sometimes local levels. In such a complex landscape, it can be unclear how different elements relate to each other. Based on a high-level review of global and European-level elements, we present a map of the biodiversity informatics landscape. This is a first attempt at identifying key datasets/databases and data services, and mapping them in a way that can be used to identify the links, gaps and redundancies in the landscape. While the map is predominantly focused on elements with a global scope, the sub-global focus at the European-level was incorporated in the map in order to demonstrate how a regional network such as the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) can usefully contribute to connecting some of the nodes within the landscape. We identify 74 elements, and find that the informatics landscape is complex in terms of the characteristics and diversity of these elements, and that there is high variability in their level of connectedness. Overall, the landscape is highly connected, with one element boasting 28 connections. The average "degrees of separation" between elements is low, and the landscape is deemed relatively robust to failures since there is no single point that information flows through. Examples of possible effort duplication are presented, and the inclusion of five policy-level elements in the map helps illustrate how informatics products can contribute to global processes that define and direct political targets. Beyond simply describing the existing landscape, this map will support a better understanding of the landscape’s current structure and functioning, enabling responsible institutions to establish or strengthen collaborations, work towards avoiding effort duplication, and facilitate access to the biodiversity data, information and knowledge required to support effective decision-making, in the context of comparatively limited funding for biodiversity knowledge and conservation. To support this, we provide the input matrix and code that created this map as supplementary materials, so that readers can more closely examine the links in the landscape, and edit the map to suit their own purposes., published version, peerReviewed

Background: Recent years have seen a surge in projects that produce large volumes of structured, machine-readable biodiversity data. To make these data amenable to processing by generic, open source "data enrichment" workflows, they are increasingly being represented in a variety of standards-compliant interchange formats. Here, we report on an initiative in which software developers and taxonomists came together to address the challenges and highlight the opportunities in the enrichment of such biodiversity data by engaging in intensive, collaborative software development: The Biodiversity Data Enrichment Hackathon. Results: The hackathon brought together 37 participants (including developers and taxonomists, i.e. scientific professionals that gather, identify, name and classify species) from 10 countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. The participants brought expertise in processing structured data, text mining, development of ontologies, digital identification keys, geographic information systems, niche modeling, natural language processing, provenance annotation, semantic integration, taxonomic name resolution, web service interfaces, workflow tools and visualisation. Most use cases and exemplar data were provided by taxonomists. One goal of the meeting was to facilitate re-use and enhancement of biodiversity knowledge by a broad range of stakeholders, such as taxonomists, systematists, ecologists, niche modelers, informaticians and ontologists. The suggested use cases resulted in nine breakout groups addressing three main themes: i) mobilising heritage biodiversity knowledge; ii) formalising and linking concepts; and iii) addressing interoperability between service platforms. Another goal was to further foster a community of experts in biodiversity informatics and to build human links between research projects and institutions, in response to recent calls to further such integration in this research domain. Conclusions: Beyond deriving prototype solutions for each use case, areas of inadequacy were discussed and are being pursued further. It was striking how many possible applications for biodiversity data there were and how quickly solutions could be put together when the normal constraints to collaboration were broken down for a week. Conversely, mobilising biodiversity knowledge from their silos in heritage literature and natural history collections will continue to require formalisation of the concepts (and the links between them) that define the research domain, as well as increased interoperability between the software platforms that operate on these concepts.

A fundamental constituent of a biodiversity observation network is the technological infrastructure that underpins it. The European Biodiversity Network project (EU BON) has been working with and improving upon pre-existing tools for data mobilization, sharing and description. This paper provides conceptual and practical advice for the use of these tools. We review tools for managing metadata, occurrence data, and ecological data and give detailed description of these tools, their capabilities and limitations. This is followed by recommendations on their deployment and possible future enhancements. This is done from the perspective of the needs of the biodiversity observation community with a view to the development of a unified user interface to these data – the European Biodiversity Portal (EBP). We described the steps taken to develop, adapt, deploy and test these tools. This document also gives an overview of the objectives that still need to be achieved and challenges to be addressed for the remainder of the project., The authors acknowledge the support of the EU BON project (http://www.eubon.eu), funded by the EU Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement № 308454.

In order to preserve the variety of life on Earth, we must understand it better. Biodiversity research is at a pivotal point with research projects generating data at an ever increasing rate. Structuring, aggregating, linking and processing these data in a meaningful way is a major challenge. The systematic application of information management and engineering technologies in the study of biodiversity (biodiversity informatics) help transform data to knowledge. However, concerted action is required to be taken by existing e-infrastructures to develop and adopt common standards, provisions for interoperability and avoid overlapping in functionality. This would result in the unification of the currently fragmented landscape that restricts European biodiversity research from reaching its full potential. The overarching goal of this COST Action is to coordinate existing research and capacity building efforts, through a bottom-up trans-disciplinary approach, by unifying biodiversity informatics communities across Europe in order to support the long-term vision of modelling biodiversity on earth. BioUnify will: 1. specify technical requirements, evaluate and improve models for efficient data and workflow storage, sharing and re-use, within and between different biodiversity communities; 2. mobilise taxonomic, ecological, genomic and biomonitoring data generated and curated by natural history collections, research networks and remote sensing sources in Europe; 3. leverage results of ongoing biodiversity informatics projects by identifying and developing functional synergies on individual, group and project level; 4. raise technical awareness and transfer skills between biodiversity researchers and information technologists; 5. formulate a viable roadmap for achieving the long-term goals for European biodiversity informatics, which ensures alignment with global activities and translates into efficient biodiversity policy.

Europe is building its Open Science Cloud; a set of robust and interoperable einfrastructures with the capacity to provide data and computational solutions through cloudbased\ud services. The development and sustainable operation of such e-infrastructures are at the forefront of European funding priorities. The research community, however, is still reluctant to engage at the scale required to signal a Europe-wide change in the mode of operation of scientific practices. The striking differences in uptake rates between\ud researchers from different scientific domains indicate that communities do not equally share the benefits of the above European investments. We highlight the need to support\ud research communities in organically engaging with the European Open Science Cloud through the development of trustworthy and interoperable Virtual Research Environments.\ud These domain-specific solutions can support communities in gradually bridging technical and socio-cultural gaps between traditional and open digital science practice, better diffusing the benefits of European e-infrastructures.

Background It is obvious to anyone studying plants in the landscape that man-made environmental change is having profound effects on the abundance, distribution and composition of plant communities. Nevertheless, quantifying these changes and estimating the impact of the different drivers of change is extremely difficult. Botanical surveying can potentially provide insights to the changes that are occurring and inform decisions related to conservation, agriculture and forestry policy. However, much of botanical surveying is conducted in such a way that it is not comparable between dates and places. Any comparison of historical and modern data has to account for biases in the recording of different taxonomic groups, geographic biases and varying surveying effort in time. In 2010 botanical recorders in the Vice Counties of Durham and South Northumberland in the United Kingdom decided to conduct a four year survey specifically to benchmark the abundance and distribution of common plants in their counties. It is intended that this survey will provide a relatively unbiased assessment with which to compare future and past surveys of the area and a means to study the drivers of biodiversity change in the North-east of England. New information This survey of Durham and South Northumberland has been designed with two goals, firstly to provide information on common vascular plant species and secondly to provide a dataset that will be versatile with respect to the sorts of questions that can be answered with the data. The survey is primarily an occupancy study of 1km2 grid squares, however, observers were also asked to provide a relative abundance estimate of the species in each grid square. The collection of relative abundance estimate data was an experiment to assess the repeatablity and useablity of such estimates.

The distribution patterns of native and introduced plants were investigated using floristic surveys of 4 km2 grid squares collected between 1987 and 2008 in lowland England. Variograms were used to compare the autocorrelatory range of 1,293 different species with their native status. Various patterns of spatial distribution were seen in the flora, including species that are highly spatially autocorrelated, through to species whose distribution is spatially uncorrelated at this scale. Almost all native plants showed autocorrelation in their distribution at distances of 100 km2) grid squares, as it often is, this can lead to the wrong conclusion that introduced plants occupy more area than native plants with a similar range.

Mass digitization is a large undertaking for a collection. It is disruptive of routine and can challenge long-held practises. Having been through the procedure and survived, we feel we have a lot of experience to share with other institutions who are considering taking on this challenge. The changes that digitization has made to our institution are positive and the digitization a success, but that is not to say that we would not have done some things differently, were we to repeat the exercise. In 2015 Meise Botanic Garden received a grant from the Flemish Government to upgrade its digitization infrastructure and mass digitize 1.2 million specimens from its African and Belgian Herbaria. The new infrastructure improved our workflow significantly, enabling us to digitize specimens five to ten times faster while also improving their quality. The mass digitization part of the project was split into two parts, imaging and transcription. The contract was awarded and out-sourced to Picturae, who started imaging in May 2016 using a conveyor belt installation. Prior to starting, a significant amount of preparation was required at the herbarium. Within one year, 1.2 million specimens were imaged. The images were captured as TIFF files and stored in triplicate at The Flemish Institute for Archiving (VIAA), while smaller derived JPEG 2000 and JPEG files were generated for day-to-day use. The second part of the project was label transcription. A third of the specimens were transcribed in-house for capturing minimal data (barcode, filing name, collector, collector number & country of origin). This was partly done to reduce costs, but also allowed us to compare in-house to out-sourced transcription. Some 500,000 specimens were transcribed, either completely or partially, by Alembo (subcontracted by Picturae).The remaining 200.000 specimens from our Belgian Herbarium are being transcribed using crowdsourcing. The latter is being realized through the citizen science platform DoeDat (www.doedat.be) that was launched in November 2017. Many lessons have been learnt with respect to implementing mass digitization, both practically and sociologically. Many of the problems encountered during the project could have been avoided by changing the workflow. The addition of extra control points during the process could have reduced problems encountered later in the data capture process. Solving these problems at a later stage was time consuming. Trying to “save money” can result in a disruptive workflow, which may lead to a number of costly errors. Mass digitization has fundamentally changed the workflow in our collections and the way in which our herbarium is managed. All images for the African and Belgian collections may be now found on our new virtual herbarium www.botanicalcollections.be.

Herbarium specimens hold a wealth of data about plants; where they come from, where they were collected and by whom. Once digitized, these data can be searched, mapped and compared. However, the information on specimens is often handwritten and even the best software systems cannot read it. This is where we get real value from citizen involvement. Digitizing these data is only possible with the aid of human intelligence. DoeDat is a multilingual open-source platform for transcription, based upon the DigiVol program of the Australian Museum and Atlas of Living Australia. DoeDat is a product of our digitization project Digital Access to Cultural Heritage Collections (DOE!), funded by the Flemish Government. DoeDat is about creating data and also, ‘Doe Dat’ means ‘do that’ in Dutch. DoeDat will help us digitize our collections, and will also give the public the chance to take an active part in the process. We aim to build a community of enthusiastic online volunteers who will help us liberate botanical data from specimen labels and documents. We launched the platform on Science Day and within two months, more than one hundred volunteers had transcribed more than 4,000 specimens. Join in at www.DoeDat.be

Reducing the damage caused by invasive species requires a community approach informed by rapidly mobilized data. Even if local stakeholders work together, invasive species do not respect borders, and national, continental and global policies are required. Yet, in general, data on invasive species are slow to be mobilized, often of insufficient quality for their intended application and distributed among many stakeholders and their organizations, including scientists, land managers, and citizen scientists. The Belgian situation is typical. We struggle with the fragmentation of data sources and restrictions to data mobility. Nevertheless, there is a common view that the issue of invasive alien species needs to be addressed. In 2017 we launched the Tracking Invasive Alien Species (TrIAS) project, which envisages a future where alien species data are rapidly mobilized, the spread of exotic species is regularly monitored, and potential impacts and risks are rapidly evaluated in support of policy decisions (Vanderhoeven et al. 2017). TrIAS is building a seamless, data-driven workflow, from raw data to policy support documentation. TrIAS brings together 21 different stakeholder organizations that covering all organisms in the terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments. These organizations also include those involved in citizen science, research and wildlife management. TrIAS is an Open Science project and all the software, data and documentation are being shared openly (Groom et al. 2018). This means that the workflow can be reused as a whole or in part, either after the project or in different countries. We hope to prove that rapid data workflows are not only an indispensable tool in the control of invasive species, but also for integrating and motivating the citizens and organizations involved.

This study demonstrates the value of legacy literature and historic collections as a source of data on environmental history. Chenopodium vulvaria L. has declined in northern Europe and is of conservation concern in several countries, whereas in other countries outside Europe it has naturalised and is considered an alien weed. In its European range it is considered native in the south, but the northern boundary of its native range is unknown. It is hypothesised that much of its former distribution in northern Europe was the result of repeated introductions from southern Europe and that its decline in northern Europe is the result of habitat change and a reduction in the number of propagules imported to the north. A historical analysis of its ecology and distribution was conducted by mining legacy literature and historical botanical collections. Text analysis of habitat descriptions written on specimens and published in botanical literature covering a period of more than 200 years indicate that the habitat and introduction pathways of C. vulvaria have changed with time. Using the non-European naturalised range in a climate niche model, it is possible to project the range in Europe. By comparing this predicted model with a similar model created from all observations, it is clear that there is a large discrepancy between the realized and predicted distributions. This is discussed together with the social, technological and economic changes that have occurred in northern Europe, with respect to their influence on C. vulvaria.

Amrum is a small barrier island on the north-west coast of Germany. The distribution of vascular plants was examined by surveying their 1km2 grid square occupancy across the whole island. These data were used in a study on the recent vegetation change in the island. These data include 3786 observations of 450 taxa collected in two surveys in 2007 and 2008.

Observations reported by citizens are crucial to the ability of scientists to inform policy on biodiversity. This is particularly relevant in the case of preventing and controlling biological invasions; that is, the introduction and spread of species outside their natural ranges as a consequence of human activity. Such invasions of natural ecosystems represent one of the main threats to biodiversity, economy, and human well-being globally, and policies on tackling this issue require a strong evidence base that increasingly is built on citizen science. Many citizens are motivated to collect data for their own interest, while presumably, few expect to make a major impact on policy. The needs of policy-makers are not always aligned with the approaches used by citizens to collect and share data. Therefore, how can we motivate citizen science for the needs of policy without compromising the enjoyment that citizens gain from collecting biodiversity observations? How can policy-makers support citizens to collect the data they need? Solutions require two components, a combination of social and technological innovation. Initiatives aimed at supporting decision-making processes should involve more societal actors and be built in a more collaborative or even co-created manner with citizens, scientists, and policy-makers. Technological solutions can be achieved through regular, rapid, and open publication of biodiversity data products. We envisage frequent publication of maps and indicators from rapidly mobilized data, with clear pointers to gaps in knowledge. Improving the links between data collection and delivery of policy-relevant information demonstrates – to citizens and their organizations – the need for their data, and gives them a clear view on the impact of their data on policy. This visibility also empowers stakeholder organizations in the policy development process.