Why share data?

Sharing data through SBDI provides many benefits to the biodiversity and ecosystems research community. In particular, SBDI supports the transition towards data-driven biodiversity research tackling complex questions using multiple data sources. But SBDI also provides benefits to individual researchers or projects sharing data.

Societal benefits

Openly shared biodiversity data, and the research based on it, form a critical knowledge platform for several intergovernmental initiatives that support global policy makers. Open biodiversity data also supports local decision makers, and it is a critical resource for education and citizen engagement.

Read more about the societal benefits of sharing biodiversity data.

Research benefits

Sharing biodiversity data supports breakthrough research, based on combining data from multiple sources to address complex scientific problems. By sharing data, you make it easier for research colleagues to find your data and to suggest new collaborative efforts. Many scientific journals and funders now require that researchers make their data openly accessible, and publishing data through SBDI is the best way to meet these requirements for biodiversity projects. SBDI can also help you demonstrate the impact of your data collection and curation efforts by tracking citations of your data.

Read more about the research benefits of sharing biodiversity data.

Data management plans

Projects collecting research data usually needs to maintain a data management plan. Read more about how SBDI can support you in creating a solid data management plan for biodiversity projects.

Sharing data with GBIF

We encourage all SBDI data providers to also share their data with GBIF. There is no better way of ensuring that the international research community can discover and use your data.

Getting cited

SBDI provides several mechanisms that make it easy for users to cite your data, and for you to discover those citations. And SBDI users are committed to cite the data they use in publications. Read more about the data citation mechanisms.