GBIF Spain launches new version of National Biodiversity Data Portal

The Coordination Unit of GBIF.ES is happy to present a new version of the National Biodiversity Data Portal. This updated site http://datos.gbif.es, provides free access to more than 24 million biodiversity records from 96 Spanish institutions and projects, as well as another million biodiversity records located in Spain published by institutions abroad.

The Spanish Atlas is based on the open source Living Atlases platform originally developed by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), a highly flexible ‘big data’ infrastructure that supports deep integration and crosslinking with other data tools and resources. The Spanish site has been customized to use the new branding of GBIF.ES and includes new functionalities and improvements.

The updated portal enables users to store, search and visualize images or other multimedia objects associated with biodiversity data. The GBIF Backbone has been incorporated as the reference scientific names list, which provides a unified taxonomic hierarchy and solves the indexing problems detected in some records in the past. The Regions module has been implemented, which allows users to explore occurrence records and taxonomic coverage associated with pre-defined regions (provinces, biogeographic regions and protected areas). It provides publishers a review of papers citing data from their datasets (E.g. http://colecciones.gbif.es/public/showDataResource/dr286). And it also allows the syncing of datasets from the GBIF.ES IPT which simplifies and speeds up the publishing process and keeps the data portal updated within minutes. The portal is available in Spanish and English and soon we expect to have it also translated to Catalan, Basque and Galician.

In the next weeks we will be publishing a series of news and tutorials aimed at exploring each of the new features. We encourage all users to use the portal and to contact us in case of any doubt. In addition, we remind that we have a user guide available at https://goo.gl/HeJU4w where we explain how to search, filter and download data in the Atlas, as well as how to check detailed information on each dataset, collection and institution.

Living Atlases Community

Many GBIF nodes and institutions around the world now use the open-source software developed for the Atlas of Living Australia for their national biodiversity data portals. Spain is part of the Living Atlases community, which now has 13 Atlases in production. The active collaboration within this community increases the network’s collective capacity and reduces the costs and the risks associated with custom software development.

The support of Dave Martin from Atlas of Living Australia has been essential to achieve this new milestone in releasing the National Portal. We also would like to acknowledge the IT support provided by the IFCA (Institute of Physics of Cantabria) and Bineo Consulting. GBIF.ES is sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, and managed by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) through the Royal Botanical Garden.

 

Regions module in the Data Portal
Data Portal Home
Registers Map in the Data Portal
Images visualizations