Biodiversity information conference brought 400 scientists from 41 countries to Bulgaria to fast-forward what we know about life on Earth
IMAGE: PROF. LYUBOMIR PENEV (PENSOFT) AND DEBORAH PAUL (TDWG) AT THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE TDWG 2022 CONFERENCE, WHICH TOOK PLACE ON 17.10.2022 IN SOFIA, BULGARIA. view more
CREDIT: PENSOFT
Between 17th and 21st October, about 400 scientists took part in a hybrid meeting dedicated to the development, use and maintenance of biodiversity data, technologies, and standards used across the world.
For the 37th time, the global scientific and educational association Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) brought together experts from all over the globe to share and discuss the latest developments surrounding biodiversity data and how they are being gathered, used, shared and integrated across time, space and disciplines.
This year, the conference was hosted by Pensoft - an international scholarly publisher and technology provider based in Sofia - in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History (Bulgaria) and the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Science.
This was the first time the event happened in a hybrid format. It was attended by 160 people on-site, while another 235 people joined online. The conference abstracts, submitted by the event’s speakers ahead of the meeting, provide a sneak peek into their presentations and are all publicly available in the TDWG journal Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (BISS).
Amongst the conference participants, there were scientists in the fields of natural sciences, as well as many data scientists, informaticians, computer scientists, and software engineers. Many attendees have affiliations with key natural history museums and institutions across the globe.
Put simply, the main task and dedication of the TDWG association is to develop and maintain standards and data-sharing protocols that support the infrastructures (e.g., The Global Biodiversity Information Facility - GBIF), which aggregate and facilitate use of these data, in order to inform and expand humanity’s knowledge about life on Earth.
Biodiversity data may include classification of organisms, their biology, genetics and distribution, as well as the whole chronology of their existence, traced back through time with information about who collected the specimens and observation data, the names of scientists involved, and their related scholarly work and publications.
The standards developed and maintained by TDWG provide a foundation to enable the creation, maintenance and development of a wide range of digital platforms, tools and workflows in the biodiversity data domain. All these technologies allow biodiversity scientists to build on the knowledge of their predecessors and make data freely accessible for use in policy decisions and further avenues of scientific inquiry.
Let’s imagine that there is a scientist who is interested in studying the distribution of a threatened animal species. While on a field trip, she spots what looks or acts like her target species, but the colouration of these particular animals is different. The question arises whether she has just found a little known variation of the species or could it be that it is a new, yet undescribed species? If the latter is true, it could change the whole picture we have so far painted for the ecosystem in question.
To answer the question, the scientist will need to be aware of what has already been published about the species of interest, and explore the related data spread across dozens of specialised platforms and databases. She will also need to take various distinct characters, e.g. morphology, physiology, DNA and behavioural traits, analyse them and compare them with those of related species. Not until the results are out, will the researcher be able to confirm whether this recently identified population indeed belongs to the species of initial interest, or whether it is totally new to science.
But why is it so important that we know if there is one or multiple species of seemingly the same animal in a given habitat? Suffice it to say, each and every species: be it an animal, a plant or a fungus, plays a key role in the ecosystem, while all living creatures—including humans—depend for their very survival on the well-being of their ecosystem. Given their strong interconnectedness and interdependability, we need to understand and closely monitor their presence, distribution and interactions with each element of the environment.
So, here is where the role of biodiversity data comes into play: biodiversity data underlie everything we know about the natural world around us. Even we, as individuals, are heavily dependent on what we know (or don’t know) about the other organisms in our ecosystem.
It is the goal of everyone volunteering their time and expertise to TDWG to enable the scientists interested in the world’s biodiversity to do their work efficiently and in a manner that can be understood, shared and reused by others.
If there are optimised and universal standards in the way researchers store and disseminate biodiversity data, all those biodiversity scientists will be able to find, access and use the knowledge in their own work much more easily. As a result, they will be much better positioned to contribute new knowledge that will later be used in nature and ecosystem conservation by key decision-makers.
“We are proud to have been selected to be the hosts of this year’s TDWG annual conference and are definitely happy to have joined and observed so many active experts network and share their know-how and future plans with each other, so that they can collaborate and make further progress in the way scientists and informaticians work with biodiversity information,” said Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
“As a publisher of multiple globally renowned scientific journals and books in the field of biodiversity and ecology, at Pensoft we assume it to be our responsibility to be amongst the first to implement those standards and good practices, and serve as an example in the scholarly publishing world. Let me remind you that it is the scientific publications that present the most reliable knowledge the world and science has, due to the scrutiny and rigour in the review process they undergo before seeing the light of day,” he added.
“It’s wonderful to be in the Balkans and Bulgaria for our Biodiversity Information and Standards (TDWG) 2022 conference! Everyone’s been so welcoming and thoughtfully engaged in conversations about biodiversity information and how we can all collaborate, contribute and benefit,” said Deborah Paul, Chair of TDWG, a biodiversity informatics specialist and community liaison at the University of Illinois, Prairie Research Institute's Illinois Natural History Survey and also an active participant in the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), the Entomological Collections Network (ECN), ICEDIG, the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and The Carpentries.
“Our TDWG mission is to create, maintain and promote the use of open, community-driven standards to enable sharing and use of biodiversity data for all,” she added.
Group photo of the in-person participants at this year’s TDWG hybrid conference, which took place between 17th and 21st October 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
For a whole week between 17th and 21st October 2022, the TDWG conference, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, saw a lot of networking and hundreds of engaging and fruitful discussions between biodiversity
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Vibe Systems http://www.vibe-systems.com/
Following the week-long conference in Sofia, a good many of the participants set off straight for another Bulgarian city and another event hosted by Pensoft. Between 22nd and 24th October, the General Assembly of the Horizon 2020-funded project BiCIKL (abbreviation for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) took place in Plovdiv. The project involves many of the active participants in the TDWG community, including Pensoft, who is the project coordinator.
BiCIKL’s goal is to create a centralised place to connect all key biodiversity data by interlinking 15 research infrastructures and their databases. The 3-year European Commission-supported initiative kicked off in 2021 and involves 14 key natural history institutions from 10 European countries.
See highlights from the event on Twitter via the conference hashtag #TDWG2022.
Additional information:
About TDWG:
Historically known as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, today's Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) is a not-for-profit, scientific and educational association formed to establish international collaboration among the creators, managers and users of biodiversity information and to promote the wider and more effective dissemination and sharing of knowledge about the world's heritage of biological organisms.
To achieve its goals, TDWG develops, ratifies and promotes standards and guidelines for the recording and exchange of data about organisms; and also acts as a forum for discussing all aspects of biodiversity information management through meetings, online discussions, and publications.
About Pensoft:
Pensoft is an independent academic publishing company, well-known worldwide for its innovations in the field of semantic publishing, as well as for its cutting-edge publishing tools and workflows. In 2013, Pensoft launched the first ever end to end XML-based authoring, reviewing and publishing workflow, as demonstrated by the Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT) and the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ), now upgraded to the ARPHA Publishing Platform. The platform currently hosts over 60 journals, including all journals of Pensoft, such as Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), One Ecosystem, ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, and many society and institutional journals published under their own brand.
About Pensoft’s and TDWG’s partnership:
In 2017, TDWG teamed up with Pensoft and ARPHA to launch its own journal, aptly named Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (BISS), to provide an innovative open-access journal, where participants at the annual TDWG events began to publish—and thus permanently preserve and make available—their conference abstracts in a full-featured, mini-paper format. The journal also welcomes full-length research articles that demonstrate the development or application of new methods and approaches in biodiversity informatics in the form of case studies.
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