The Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN, http://www.ggbn.org) is a global network of well-managed collections of genomic tissue samples from across the Tree of Life, benefiting society through biodiversity research, development and conservation. This network will foster collaborations among repositories of molecular biodiversity in order to ensure quality standards, improve best practices, secure interoperability, and harmonize exchange of material in accordance with national and international legislation and conventions.

The GGBN Data Standard is a set of vocabularies designed to represent tissue, DNA or RNA samples associated to voucher specimens, tissue samples and collections (http://terms.tdwg.org/wiki/GGBN_Data_Standard). It is based on ABCDDNA, a product of the DNA Bank Network. The current GGBN Data Standard is a result of extensive reviews done with the GGBN community. The GGBN Data Standard is intended to be used with ABCD or Darwin Core and is not a stand-alone solution. Test implementations are available for both ABCD and Darwin Core Archive.

The GGBN Data Standard will be submitted to TDWG in 2015 after public release of the new GGBN Data Portal in June 2015. The standard covers issues of loans, permits, preservation, preparation, amplification, single reads, DNA cloning and gel images. Here we present the Darwin Core Archive implementation of the GGBN Data Standard and how it is used in the context of GGBN.