Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure

Driven by scientific opportunity and societal challenges, biodiversity and ecosystems research are rapidly developing into big-data sciences, enabling researchers to model processes that affect entire biotas and to predict system-wide effects of environmental change.

The Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI), supported by eleven partner organizations, will be the key e-infrastructure driving this transition in Sweden.

SBDI will mobilize data from a wide range of sources into a single Swedish biodiversity data layer, and provide access, analysis and visualization services offering the research community rich opportunities for innovative, interdisciplinary research on biodiversity and ecosystems.

This research is of vital importance for society´s ability to reach the sustainable development goals outlined by the United Nations.A core mission of SBDI is to support Open Science and the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles in biodiversity and ecosystems research.

Technically, SBDI is based on open-source software developed in international collaboration within the Global Biodiversity Informatics Facility (GBIF) and Living Atlases (LA) communities, and on tools developed within the Swedish LifeWatch and Biodiversity Atlas Sweden infrastructures.

SBDI contributions to the LA developer community will focus on Swedish areas of excellence: system integration, near-real-time data mobilization, marine biodiversity, natural history collections data, systematic monitoring programs, biotelemetry, microbial diversity (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes, and microscopic fungi), palaeoecology and molecular biodiversity data.

SBDI will accelerate progress in these areas, and open up exciting new possibilities for integrative analyses of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

SBDI will serve as the Swedish node in GBIF and as an observer in the LifeWatch ERIC through the Nordic LifeWatch collaboration.