Dmitry Schigel, Gabriele Dröge, Siro Masinde

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) have been seeking expert opinions and the best available experiences from biodiversity and genomics scientists as well as data holders on how to link morphological and molecular biodiversity data, i.e. physical specimens, derived DNA, sequences, observations and other evidence of species' presence and abundance in space and time. The survey targeted data users and publishers of specimen and sequence information.

GBIF provides a single access point to the largest number of records on species occurrences comprising mainly specimen data from natural history collections and observational data from research, monitoring and citizen science projects. GGBN brings together the world’s biodiversity biobanks in order to make high quality well-documented and vouchered collections that store DNA and/or tissue samples of biodiversity discoverable and accessible. Many institutions are currently developing and implementing various digitisation projects, and it has been suggested that sampling the collections for genomic analyses could be better linked and included in the workflows to enhance efficiency.

In particular, we aimed at i) better understand the data use and data publishing needs of molecular biodiversity researchers, ii) get an overview of molecular collection holdings, 3) document existing data management solutions for environmental samples. The survey run from May to September 2016 and early signals were presented and discussed at the GGBN conference in Berlin in June 2016. Final results summarizing the survey of more than 190 respondents are presented to TDWG 2016 in Costa Rica for further discussion and elaboration of the action plan.