Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GLOBIS-B (GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research)
Reporting period: 2016-12-01 to 2018-05-31
Biodiversity and ecosystem research is addressing the grand societal challenge to predict the biosphere under global environmental change. It is difficult to predict the complex ways of biosphere change in relation to other planetary – global - changes. Researchers are addressing this grand societal challenge since biodiversity change has huge impacts on the environmental stability of temperature, air composition, the availability of fresh water and food, and wider our human health. The GLOBIS-B project studied how biodiversity research infrastructures can work together globally to provide services for data provision and data processing for the researchers on biodiversity change. Specific problems are the scattered – often not interoperable - data over many repositories, and the many gaps in especially time series data. In addition, a problem is that scientists have different opinions on how to express change at the various dimensions of biodiversity (as for example genes, species, communities). The GEO Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) has proposed in cooperation with the scientific community a minimal set of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), but this needs operationalization and testing for wider use. To serve these challenges, the GLOBIS-B project also addressed the required capabilities to process massive datasets in computational workflows based on data and web services from different research infrastructures. The project promoted a global cooperation of world-class research infrastructures with a focus on targeted services to support frontier research that deals with predicting the biosphere and measuring the indicators of biodiversity change. More specifically the project objectives were:
• facilitate the multi-lateral cooperation of global research infrastructures to support frontier research on Predicting the Biosphere with a focus on Essential Biodiversity Variables(EBV).
• specify requirements for extracting, handling and analysing the required biodiversity data for EBV classes from diverse sources.
• develop an integrated research agenda with these requirements allowing research infrastructures to enhance existing capabilities or develop new ones.
• agree on realistic solutions for to address the research agenda, so that the research infrastructures can offer targeted services to calculate the selected EBVs.
• draw up best practices for infrastructure support on the biodiversity grand challenges.
• address the legal implications on licensing, intellectual property rights (IPR), and sharing of resources.
• communicate and disseminate outcomes to policy stakeholders and other interest groups.
Another key issue is how realistic and pragmatic solutions may streamline the legal bottlenecks for the reciprocal use of data and software tools from different origins. Solutions should be workable for both the scientific communities and the cooperating research infrastructures, especially in regard to achieving direct machine-machine interactions. Through a final fifth workshop, the interaction with national, supra-national and global policy bodies contributed to potential refinements of general policies supporting legal interoperability.
• facilitate the multi-lateral cooperation of global research infrastructures to support frontier research on Predicting the Biosphere with a focus on Essential Biodiversity Variables(EBV).
• specify requirements for extracting, handling and analysing the required biodiversity data for EBV classes from diverse sources.
• develop an integrated research agenda with these requirements allowing research infrastructures to enhance existing capabilities or develop new ones.
• agree on realistic solutions for to address the research agenda, so that the research infrastructures can offer targeted services to calculate the selected EBVs.
• draw up best practices for infrastructure support on the biodiversity grand challenges.
• address the legal implications on licensing, intellectual property rights (IPR), and sharing of resources.
• communicate and disseminate outcomes to policy stakeholders and other interest groups.
Another key issue is how realistic and pragmatic solutions may streamline the legal bottlenecks for the reciprocal use of data and software tools from different origins. Solutions should be workable for both the scientific communities and the cooperating research infrastructures, especially in regard to achieving direct machine-machine interactions. Through a final fifth workshop, the interaction with national, supra-national and global policy bodies contributed to potential refinements of general policies supporting legal interoperability.
Focus on user requirements: discussion on scientific questions underpinning the concept of EBVs, and the related data and technical requirements to compute the EBVs. Two workshops resulted in a multi-author paper published in open access. Two other workshops resulted in the preparation of similar publications. The results also advised GEO BON in its undertakings to develop EBVs.
Data and technical services for infrastructure delivery: cooperation of technical experts and infrastructure operators to map the above requirements with existing possibilities of the research infrastructures. A design for a computational workflow helped to accommodate the requirements, and to identify which contributions for workflow components could be expected from each infrastructure. An additional final outcome is a manifesto with ten principles, which serves as guidance with specific implementation actions needed for participating research infrastructures to fully support the emerging EBV operational framework based on transnational and cross-infrastructure scientific workflows.
Policy and legal issues: addressing the legal interoperability of data and software. Licenses of providers – if any - are very different, complicating the correct use of data and software. This is a major obstacle when composing a computational workflow with components from different origins and owners, especially when legal licenses are not machine readable and interpretable. A final workshop with representatives of policy bodies promoted the interest of actual users of EBV data and they discussed next steps for EBV production on a global scale.
Dissemination and workshop organisation: outreach mechanisms and the organisation of the project workshops. This contributed to a strong visibility of the project and the role of research infrastructures in supporting the construction of EBVs. Addressed dissemination audiences were also scientific technical communities, the GEO community and the Research Data Alliance (the latter ones on the process of getting from observational data to relevant information products).
Data and technical services for infrastructure delivery: cooperation of technical experts and infrastructure operators to map the above requirements with existing possibilities of the research infrastructures. A design for a computational workflow helped to accommodate the requirements, and to identify which contributions for workflow components could be expected from each infrastructure. An additional final outcome is a manifesto with ten principles, which serves as guidance with specific implementation actions needed for participating research infrastructures to fully support the emerging EBV operational framework based on transnational and cross-infrastructure scientific workflows.
Policy and legal issues: addressing the legal interoperability of data and software. Licenses of providers – if any - are very different, complicating the correct use of data and software. This is a major obstacle when composing a computational workflow with components from different origins and owners, especially when legal licenses are not machine readable and interpretable. A final workshop with representatives of policy bodies promoted the interest of actual users of EBV data and they discussed next steps for EBV production on a global scale.
Dissemination and workshop organisation: outreach mechanisms and the organisation of the project workshops. This contributed to a strong visibility of the project and the role of research infrastructures in supporting the construction of EBVs. Addressed dissemination audiences were also scientific technical communities, the GEO community and the Research Data Alliance (the latter ones on the process of getting from observational data to relevant information products).
The project built on existing capabilities of the cooperating research infrastructures and paved the way toward utilizing these in computational workflows for producing EBV datasets at large scales. This resulted in considerable progress on understanding the EBV concept, on how research infrastructures can work together to implement computational workflows for EBV construction, and how both policy authorities and scientific communities may benefit from a resource of EBV data products. A coordinated test on biodiversity change related to the distribution of invasive species showed that the GLOBIS-B results are feasible in practice. Depending on any preferred policy indicator, it now becomes possible to construct the indicator from a data selection of EBV data sets. Sufficiently large EBV data sets would potentially allow forecasting trends and assessing the impact of environmental management interventions. The fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties in 2020 is expected to update the Convention's strategic plan, and GEO BON, as inspired by GLOBIS-B results, will inform delegates how, and under which conditions a larger EBV data set could come into place. It is potentially possible to construct EBV data products at an industrial scale, and thus build a large EBV data set. The research infrastructures are each planning for their region a common policy for building such EBV data sets at the national and regional levels. Finally, the cooperation with a Research Data Alliance (RDA) working group resulted in recommendations on best practices for data owners with respect to legal issues on data access and interoperability