Coming to an end, after 4.5 years of hard work and dedicated research, the FP7-funded project EU BON ‘European Biodiversity Observation Network’ (www.eubon.eu) leaves behind a basket of results to support the Group of Earth Observations (GEO) and assists researchers in their future studies.
Among the major outcomes of the project is the European Biodiversity Portal offering a wide range of products and tools (40+) for data mobilization, sharing, and integration as well as for data analysis and data publishing, and serving as a communication interface between biodiversity researchers, data repositories, interested communities and policy makers.
One of the main aims of EU BON is to support the work of GEO and GEO BON and through its outputs the project achieved this in several ways:
- Tools developed in the project are part of GEO BONs BON-in-a-Box, an online toolkit for national and regional biodiversity observation systems.
- A prototype data browser was developed by GBIF and EU BON to make existing data discoverable, e.g. species occurrence datasets, and to evaluate species richness and population trends, applying the Essential Biodiversity Variable concept by using real data.
- The data standard Darwin Core was extended for sample-based biodiversity monitoring data to better capture biodiversity monitoring schemes.
- In case the technological infrastructure is lacking, EU BON also provides tools (GBIF IPT, PlutoF) for publishing and curating biodiversity data in order to provide open data access.
- A plethora of tools were developed for analysing and modeling data.
The EU BON website will continue to exist and host relevant information for at least the next 5 years to ensure project results are easy to access and reuse, not only by EU BON researchers, but for anyone interested in the project or working in the field. Please have a look into the online library and media center, where you can find for example publications, deliverables, infographics, policy briefs and the final brochure. EU BON’s Final Brochure showcases selected outcomes from the project and can be downloaded.
The EU BON consortium would like to thank its associated partners and the whole GEO community for the continued support.
Author: Anke Hoffmann