Adoption of ‘orphaned’ Spanish datasets completed

Last year, the GBIF Secretariat requested the assistance of national nodes in the network to help rescue a collection of ‘orphaned’ datasets. These datasets no longer appeared to be actively curated or managed, suggesting that their original data hosts no longer had the capacity to host them. In some cases, data hosts have even lost datasets, for example, due to server failure, leaving no other backup than the versions published through GBIF.org.

The 2018 GBIF implementation plan called to have all datasets claimed, curated and re-hosted (activity 4a), and we have recently fulfilled this goal by restoring 94 orphaned datasets from Spanish institutions and hosting them on the GBIF.ES IPT. Adoption of these datasets facilitates curated updates and corrections and also ensures the ability to reproduce research that is based on these datasets.

We would like to acknowledge the help made by Lydia de la Cruz in this regard – former student of the Master in Biodiversity in Tropical Areas and its Conservation, organized by the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) and the Higher Research Council Scientific (CSIC). Lydia has done the master’s practice in the Coordination Unit of GBIF.ES. Thanks to her time and energy invested in this effort and the GBIFS support we have adopted a bigger set of orphan datasets than any other GBIF node. More news related to this activity coming very soon.

Lydia and the GBIF.ES team