The Digital Extended Specimen
Developing a globally integrated and extensible biodiversity data infrastructure
Vision
Enable research that contributes to novel discoveries and addresses the societal challenges leading to the biodiversity crisis.
Mission
Expand on the community-driven successes to connect biodiversity data and knowledge through coordination of a globally integrated network of stakeholders to enable an extensible technical and social infrastructure of data, tools, and working practices in support of our vision.
Stakeholders
- Bio-/Geodiversity scientists, anthropologists
- Collection professionals, curators, administrators
- Conservation biologists and geneticists, ecologists, environmental scientists
- Amateur experts and citizen scientists
- Indigenous peoples and local communities
- Biodiversity informaticians, ICT professionals
- Natural science collection institutions
- Professional societies, NGOs
- Governmental agencies, UN agencies, intergovernmental organizations
- Policymakers (national, regional, global)
- Funding agencies, investors
- Industry (e.g. producing, pharmaceutical, financial)
- Consulting businesses
- Agriculture, forestry and fisheries
- Humanities and the Arts
- …
Who we are
We are an international group of collection-based biodiversity scientists, collection professionals, infrastructure providers and biodiversity informaticians from five continents with advanced expertise and long-term experience in developing and interconnecting social and technical networks.
Our interest is in interlinking existing major regional biodiversity data infrastructures based on the Digital Extended Specimen concept (DES).
Thereby, a key objective is to facilitate the initiation of a globally integrated backbone that makes community participation and bidirectional collaboration possible.