Want to Describe and Share Biodiversity Inventory and Monitoring Data? The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Can Help

• Published in: Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 2023-09, Vol.7, p.75350
• Main Authors: Sica, Yanina, Hochachka, Wesley, Gan, Yi-Ming, Ingenloff, Kate, Schigel, Dmitry, Stevenson, Robert, Baskauf, Steven, Brenton, Peter, Kazem, Anahita, Wieczorek, John
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Check lists; Interoperability; New records
• ISSN: 2535-0897; 2535-0897
• DOI: 10.3897/biss.7.112229

Access to high-quality ecological data is critical to assessing and modeling biodiversity and its changes through space and time. The Darwin Core standard has proven to be immensely helpful in sharing species occurrence data (see Wieczorek et al. 2012, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF) and promoting biodiversity research following the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (Wilkinson et al. 2016). However, it is limited in its ability to fully accommodate inventory data (i.e., linked records of multiple taxa at a specific place and time). Information about the inventory processes is often either unreported or described in an unstructured manner, limiting its potential re-use for larger-scale analyses. Two key aspects that are not captured in a structured manner yet are: i) information about the species that were not detected during an inventory, and ii) ancillary information about sampling effort and completeness. Non-detections (i.e., reported counts of zero) potentially enable more accurate and precise estimates of distribution, abundance, and changes in abundance. This becomes possible when variation in effort is used to estimate the likelihood that a non-detection represents a true absence of that taxon during the inventory. Currently, ecological inventory data, when shared at all, are typically discoverable through dataset catalogs (e.g., governmental data repositories) and supplementary materials to publications. With few exceptions, indexing of such data with the detail and structure needed has not been attempted at broad temporal and spatial scales, despite the potentially high value resulting from making inventory data more readily accessible. To address these limitations in documenting inventory data using the Darwin Core, Guralnick et al. (2018) proposed the Humboldt Core. Subsequent discussions within the biodiversity standards community made it clear that greater integration could be achieved by creating an extension of the Darwin Core, rather than developing a new standard in isolation. Extension design work began in 2021 and progress has been reported by Brenton (2021) and Sica et al. (2022). Over the last year the Humboldt Extension Task Group has sought advice from data providers and aggregators and updated its vocabulary terms. A challenging aspect has been creating terminology for the parent-child relationships (see Properties of Hierarchical Events) needed to describe surveys that m