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Strategic plan

SBDI – Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure – provides data and analysis services that offer rich opportunities for innovative, interdisciplinary research on biodiversity and ecosystems. But how was SBDI formed? What is the vision, and how will the infrastructure be developed over the coming years? Here, we provide the answers.

To realize our vision – to provide a cost-effective, cutting-edge infrastructure that supports Swedish and international biodiversity and ecosystems research – we have identified the following five priority areas: 

Delivery of relevant data

SBDI will provide access to the data resources and the aggregated data products needed by biodiversity researchers of all types and by policymakers to support conservation and sustainable development. We will work together with users in defining state-of-the-art requirements for data delivery and data products, and with providers in curating source data to the highest possible standard. 

Development of the national research infrastructure

SBDI will be continuously developed primarily to meet the needs of Swedish researchers, but also the needs of any other relevant group holding or requiring biodiversity data for research, and leveraging the collected skills and resources of all relevant informatics teams. Systems development will be based on international collaboration within the Living Atlases-, GBIF- and related communities, ensuring that Sweden benefits from and contributes to the development efforts of the global biodiversity informatics community. 

Delivery of tools for data access, visualization, and analysis

SBDI will provide a wide range of services and tools enabling researchers and other stakeholders to discover, access, analyze and visualize biodiversity data. This will include support for popular computing environments, such as R and Python, as well as the provision of Web-based graphical user interfaces, virtual research environments and online computing platforms facilitating big-data analyses. 

Enhanced outreach

SBDI will implement an ambitious outreach program, with the aim of educating and supporting national and international researchers, data publishers, governmental bodies, decision makers, and the general public in how to use the available tools to their fullest extent. In particular, the outreach program will focus on the critical importance of the SBDI infrastructure in addressing the biodiversity decline, the rapidly changing environment, and the climate emergency. 

Empowerment of the biodiversity informatics network

SBDI will cooperate with national and international initiatives, research programs, infrastructures and other stakeholders in delivering the best possible services to the biodiversity and ecosystem research communities, and in promoting the widest possible use of biodiversity data in other scientific disciplines and in society at large.