Responsibilities regarding management and conservation of biodiversity and the natural environment are very distributed in Spain. "On the ground" data gathering and management is carried out by regional governments (17 in Spain), whereas the Ministry does most of the coordination and data integration. On top are all the reporting mechanisms implemented at the European level  (involving The European Commission and the European Environment Agency) that impose additional challenges (e.g., complying with the INSPIRE data specifications http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/2). All of this needs to be organized, shared, and traced.

The solution currently implemented involves some local and autonomous components, and some central components, such as:

The adoption by national and regional administrations of Plinian Core  as the lingua franca for sharing and exchanging species information;

The compilation of national species check-lists as standard lists to which regional lists can be mapped and harmonized. These species lists have, in many cases, explicit references to descriptions (as expression of stable concepts); taxon concepts, names and references are managed using persistent identifiers (UUIDs, LSIDs, and DOIs); and

A national platform to store species-level information, able to ingest and produce Darwin Core Archives and INSPIRE compliant outputs, to be managed by the Ministry of Environment but open to all relevant administrative or academic actors. The underpinning database is able to handle all Plinian Core terms with a high degree of sophistication.

Our poster highlights features and solutions adopted, some lessons learned, and some perspective of the relative importance and costs of the central components.