After more than seven years, the German Federation for Biological Data research data management project comes to an end – and celebrates the continuation of its work

The German Federation for Biological Data (GFBio) comprises around 20 partner institutions from the scientific community. Since 2013, it has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over three project phases with a total of around 12 million euros. The project partners, consisting of data centers, data management and IT specialists, were driven by the mission to make biological and environmental data permanently discoverable. Far too often, the participants had observed in the course of their scientific careers, collected research data from the fields of biology and ecology elude long-term use - because they are not collected and stored in a way that makes them accessible, reusable or interoperable with other data.

"GFBio has established a consortial infrastructure in Germany that ensures the long-term archiving and publication of biodiversity-relevant data. In addition, we have set the course to be able to reuse archived data more efficiently in the future," says Dr. Michael Diepenbroek, who looks back on the project as a long-time manager of the PANGAEA data center and GFBio project coordinator. One result of the collaboration is the data portal www.gfbio.org, which makes data from ten affiliated data centers accessible. It provides a central point of contact and support for services relating to standardization, publication, analysis and the management of biological and ecological research data, which are now being maintained and further developed in NFDI4Biodiversity.

Successes that were duly celebrated at the conclusion of the project: In September, members gathered for the final meeting. Together, the heads of the work areas in the project took stock, discussed challenges, stumbling blocks and achievements. At the same time, they looked to the future: A non-profit association had already been founded in 2016 to be able to ensure the continuation of the developed data management services. Now GFBio e.V. is the coordinating project partner of the large-scale project NFDI4Biodiversity, which started in October 2020 and builds on and expands the foundations of GFBio. Around 50 institutions from all over Germany are working together on this project, including GFBio project partners and other research institutions, as well as state offices and associations, natural history societies and civil society initiatives. Their goal is to make biodiversity, ecology and environmental data from the entire community sustainably available. Their drive: to enable better contributions to the conservation of global biodiversity – because actors in science, politics and nature conservation need a reliable data basis.

In addition to the continuity of services and data, there is also continuity in the coordination of the two large scale projects GFBio and NFDI4Biodiversity: both were and are scientifically managed at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. Dr. Michael Diepenbroek now passed the baton to the spokesperson of NFDI4Biodiversity, Prof. Dr. Frank Oliver Glöckner, who acknowledged the successes of GFBio as the cornerstone of NFDI4Biodiversity: "Without the valuable work of GFBio, NFDI4Biodiversity would not have been possible. GFBio pioneered the cultural change in research data management of biological data."