Research benefits

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 many benefits to individual researchers or projects sharing data.

Support breakthrough research

The amount of biodiversity information accessible to researchers is increasing very rapidly thanks to the adoption of new technologies for recording and sharing data. This opens up the possibility to address scientific questions that we simply have not been able to tackle previously. We can now formulate and test scientific hypotheses based on millions of data points collected by researchers, citizens, and machines. Data-driven biodiversity research allows us to investigate biological systems at an unprecedented scale, using sophisticated models that span from the genetic to the ecosystem level, and that include the full spectrum of organismal diversity from microbes to megafauna.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the fates of humankind and of biological diversity are tightly linked. Therefore, this research is of vital importance. SBDI helps you share your data and adopt the open science culture needed to support the emerging field of data-driven biodiversity research.

For some inspiring examples of data-driven biodiversity research, see the GBIF science review or explore some SBDI case studies.

Find collaborators and partners

Data publishing makes your data visible to researchers around the world. In particular if it is associated with good metadata describing it. Colleagues can then find your data and information about those who provide it. A good start for new collaborations among data owners and researchers.

Meet funding and publishing requirements

Many funding agencies now require researchers receiving public funds to make data freely accessible at the end of a project. Similarly, scientific journals often require papers to be accompanied by links to relevant data repositories. We help you meet these requirements. SBDI is the obvious partner in making biodiversity data freely accessible.

Demonstrate impact

Publishing data through SBDI makes it possible for others to acknowledge your data collection and curation efforts by citing your data. We also track citations of your data. You can use this service to demonstrate impact to your funders and other stakeholders. For instance, collection managers can trace usage and citations of digitized data published from their institutions, supporting their digitization efforts.

You can also make it easier for others to discover and cite your data by publishing a data paper. A data paper is a proper research publication describing your dataset. Parts of a data paper can be generated automatically from the metadata you share with SBDI by many journals.

Read more about data citation and data papers.