Consortium Of European Taxonomic Facilities Research Articles

Non-Copyrightability of Data in Scientific Publications: A Free-for-All or a Global Commons Partnership?

Scientific publications provide a wealth of peer-reviewed, high-quality data that have been maintained over time, resulting in data persistence. As data repositories with rich provenance information, publications are indispensable sources for the integration and extension of networks of interlinked Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR*1) bio/geodiversity data. In this way, they form pivotal fact- and knowledge-based contributions to applications that address the biodiversity crisis. The mobilization of data preserved in scientific publications is hindered, however, by distinct copyright legislation contexts for publications versus the data that they contain. Moreover, legislations concerning copyright continue to lack harmonization across jurisdictions, their interpretation is difficult, and the applicable legal national scope can be uncertain. We clarify and highlight that data within scientific publications are not copyrightable and thus can be openly and freely reused once legal access has been gained to their enclosing publication*2. To ensure that publications are as accessible as possible, a joint statement supported by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) (Benichou et al. 2023) recommends that authors and publishers make their works as accessible as possible by using a CC-BY license or preferably waive copyright (CC0) to their publications. Explicitly associating a public domain mark (PDM, e.g., the PDM from Creative Commons) to their published data, provides users with certainty about reusability. Yet, by setting works and bio/geodiversity data into the public domain, they do not become a free-for-all. We stress that data need to be associated with clear provenance information in alignment with scientific best practices and the scientific community's social norms. This includes providing detailed attribution to authors of cited works and reused data. Proposed data governance labels, for example, modeled after the Local Contexts labels developed by the international Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) community, would enable authors to communicate social and ethical contexts and applicable rules to data users for ensuring the sustainability of a shared environmental and data commons. Categories of Local Contexts labels that are of interest and applicable in the sciences are, for example, those that communicate (1) correct citation information and ask for attribution when knowledge and/or data are reused (Traditional Knowledge label (TK) Attribution), (2) an interest in being recognized and acknowledged due to a significant relationship with and responsibility for samples and data (Biocultural label (BC) Provenance), (3) the verification of the data and their context following a community protocol (TK Verified), (4) that non-commercial use (TK Non-Commercial/BC Non-Commercial) or (5) outreach activities (TK Outreach/BC Outreach) are generally permitted, while for other uses direct contact and engagement is required, or (6) an openness to collaboration and partnerships (TK Collaboration/BC Collaboration). There are concerns about the tension between the goal of achieving open data (e.g., Anonymous 2014) to enable and promote open science (e.g., UNESCO 2021) and, at the same time, imposing restrictions on these data in the form of governance labels. Furthermore, while the reference of the publication through which data are published, as well as more specifically bibliographic references cited for specific data within the publication, provide sufficient information for attribution and provenance, much more fine-grained and nuanced contextual information (e.g., in the form of metadata) is needed for assuring responsible reuse. Such context-providing metadata unlock the full potential of the data and enable their reusability. This can be done using machine-actionable markup tags in combination with human-readable labels that inform machines and human users about the semantics of the data as well as their ethical and social dimensions that govern responsible and sustainable reuse. Future work is needed to discover, differentiate and define the quality and scope of the appropriate contexts that are necessary and sufficient for being able to fully and responsibly reuse the data in different situations.

GBIF-Compliant Data Pipeline for the Management and Publication of a Global Taxonomic Reference List of Pests in Natural History Collections

There is a growing demand for monitoring pests in natural history collections (NHCs) and establishing integrated pest management (IPM) solutions (Crossman and Ryde 2022). In this context, up-to-date taxonomic reference lists and controlled vocabularies following standard schemes are crucial and facilitate recording organisms detected in collections. The data pipeline described here results in the publication of a taxon reference list based on information from online resources and standard IPM literature. Most of the over 140 pest taxa on species level and above are insects, the rest belong to other animal groups and fungi. The complete taxon names, synonyms, English and German common names, and the hierarchical classification (parent-child relationships) are organised in a client-server installation of DiversityTaxonNames (DTN) at the Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB). DTN is a Microsoft Structured Query Language (MS SQL) database tool of the Diversity Workbench (DWB) framework with a published Entity Relation (ER) diagram (Hagedorn et al. 2019). The management is done using the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) backbone taxonomy as external name resource, with linkage to the respective Wikidata Q item ID as a external persistent identifier (PID). Moreover, information on pest occurrence in NHCs is given, distinguishing the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) major NHC collection types affected (i.e., heritage sciences, life sciences and earth sciences) and the object categories, e.g., natural objects/specimens damaged. The data management in DTN enables the long-running curation, done by list curators. The generic data pipeline for the management and publication of a Global Taxonomic Reference List of Pests in NHCs is based on the DTN taxon lists concept and architecture and described under About "Taxon list of pest organisms for IPM at natural history collections compiled at the SNSB". It includes four steps (A–D) with significant results for best practices of data processing (Fig. 1). A. The data is managed and processed for publication by list curators in the database DiversityTaxonNames (DTN). As a result, the list can be kept up-to-date and is—without transformation—ready to be used for IPM solutions at any NHC with a DiversityCollection installation and as part of the DWB cloud services. B. The up-to-date data is publicly available via the DTN REST Webservice for Taxon Lists with machine-readable Application Programming Interface (API). As a result, the dynamic list publication service can be used as a reference backbone for establishing IPM solutions for pest monitoring at any NHC. C. The data is provided via the GBIF checklist data publication pipeline of the SNSB through GBIF validation tools and Darwin Core Archive in DwC-A (zip format) for GBIF. As a result, the checklist information becomes part of the GBIF network with GBIF ChecklistBank and GBIF Global Taxonomy. This ensures future compliance of data with the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse (FAIR) guiding principles. D. The DTN REST Web service for Taxon Lists (currently 60 lists) is registered and accessible through the German Federation for Biological Data (GFBio) Terminology service. As a result, the lists with external PIDs and other information are available as a service (see DTN lists overview). In the upcoming Research Data Commons of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) Initiative (Diepenbroek et al. 2021), it will be part of a standardized layer of APIs with an agreed interface scheme for improved accessibility. The provided tools, API and data are part of the upcoming NFDI4Biodiversity service portfolio. Future scenarios include the use of the list items and properties as classes for diagnosis purposes with DiversityNaviKey (Triebel et al. 2021) including the publication of images for identifying pests.

A Novel Part in the Swiss Army Knife for Linking Biodiversity Data: The digital specimen identifier service

Digital specimens are new information objects on the internet, which act as digital surrogates of the physical objects they represent. They are designed to be extended with data derived from the specimen like genetic, morphological and chemical data, and with data that puts the specimen in context of its gathering event and the environment it was derived from. This requires linking the digital specimens and their related entities to information about agents, locations, publications, taxa and environmental information. To establish reliable links and (re-)connect data to specimens, a new framework is needed, which creates persistent identifiers (PIDs) for the digital specimen and its related entities. These PIDs should be actionable by machines but also can be used by humans for data citation and communication purposes. The framework that enables this is a new PID infrastructure, produced by the European Commission-funded BiCIKL project (Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library), creates persistent and actionable identifiers. It is a generic PID infrastructure that will be used by the Distributed System for Scientific Collections research infrastructure (DiSSCo), but it can also be used by other infrastructures and institutions. PIDs minted by DiSSCo will be linked to the digital specimens and samples provided through DiSSCo. The new PIDs are a key element in enabling the concept of Digital Extended Specimens (Webster et al. 2021) and provide unique and resolvable references to enable bidirectional linking. DiSSCo has done extensive work to select the most appropriate PID scheme (Hardisty et al. 2021) and to design a PID infrastructure for the pan-European specimens. The draft design has been discussed with technical specialists in the joint DiSSCo and Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) community, with international stakeholders like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) and was discussed at the 2022 conference of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC). A first implementation was demonstrated in the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) annual conference in 2022 and illustrated key elements in the design. To be able to provide digital specimen identifiers as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), a pilot project was started in 2023 with DataCite to investigate if Digital Specimen DOIs in the new PID infrastructure can be created using the DataCite service. The pilot aim was to create metadata crosswalks to the DataCite schema in consultation with the DataCite Metadata Working Group, to evaluate synergies with the IGSN (International Generic Sample Number) metadata schema, to develop and test PID kernel metadata registration, and to evaluate performance and the impact of using DataCite services. There are around two billion specimens and creating PIDs for them as DOIs requires creating DOIs at an unprecedented scale. Also, PID kernel metadata registration is new for DOIs. The included metadata for specimens will complement existing Biodiversity Information Standards such as Darwin Core, and supports the new MIDS (Minimum Information about a digital specimen) standard that is under development. The design, development and testing of the new PID infrastructure is being done as part of the BiCIKL project that aims to foster collaboration between infrastructures and develop bidirectional connections (Penev et al. 2022). In the session, we will demonstrate the results in development of the PID infrastructure as part of the BiCIKL toolbox to link biodiversity data and to discuss the progress with creating digital specimen DOIs.

The Ecosystem of Linked Biodiversity Publications: General Picture of Tools and Services Created by Plazi, Pensoft, MNHN, CETAF, Zenodo, and SIBiLS

A goal of natural history institutions is to contribute to the understanding of biodiversity and disseminate this knowledge through scholarly publications and other public activities. In today’s world, it is expected that this knowledge, imprisoned in separated silos of millions of publications scattered through ca. 500 million published pages, is readily available for exploring and reusing by humans and artificial intelligence tools. The goal of the BiCIKL project and its key product, the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH), is to put together novel tools and services to publish and extract data from publications to create findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) corpus of digital data, and establish explicit links between the data in publications and cited data types (taxonomic names, gene sequences, occurrences, images). This corpus of data is made available to the researchers and practitioners through the Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), the “Biodiversity PMC” digital library, Synospecies, and the OpenBiodiv knowledge graph through analytic tools, including artificial intelligence, and to a large extend through the re-use by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and ChecklistBank (CLB). This presentation will focus on the entire ecosystem of interlinked services created by Plazi, Pensoft, the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris (Science Press), the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) e-publishing working group, the Zenodo repository at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Literature Services of the Swiss Insitute of Bioinformatics (SIBiLS) to enforce both novel methods for prospective semantic publishing and text and data mining of legacy literature. In the end, all knowledge, published in various journals by many publishers in different parts of the world, comes together into a standardized and re-usable open and linked FAIR data pool for the benefit of the researchers and society.

Joint statement on best practices for the citation of authorities of scientific names in taxonomy by CETAF, SPNHC and BHL

This joint statement aims at encouraging all authors, publishers and editors involved in scientific publishing to give the bibliographic source of the authorities of taxonomic names. This initiative, written by members of the three communities, has been approved by the executive boards of the SPNHC (Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections), CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) and BHL (Biodiversity Heritage Library).

Biodiversity Informatics: A success story for the long-term financial sustainability of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

The European Open Science Cloud's (EOSC) ambition to provide European researchers, innovators, companies, and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research, innovation, and educational purposes. To enable this, EOSC promotes the use of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles. The EOSC Sustainability Working Group under the EOSC Secretariat published the FAIR Lady Report (European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2020), formulating recommendations for sustainability in the form of a Minimal Viable EOSC (MVE) including criteria for its sustainable implementation, formed by three essential components: EOSC Core, containing the minimum set of components necessary to provide researchers with the means to discover, share, access and reuse data and services; ESOC Exchange, a marketplace built on top of the EOSC Core to extend the set of public and private providers, and EOSC Data federation. EOSC Core, containing the minimum set of components necessary to provide researchers with the means to discover, share, access and reuse data and services; ESOC Exchange, a marketplace built on top of the EOSC Core to extend the set of public and private providers, and EOSC Data federation. The EOSC Association was established in July 2020 as the legal entity to govern EOSC. The Association appointed several Advisory Groups to provide recommendations towards the implementation of EOSC, including two Task Forces on Long Term Data Preservation and on the Financial Sustainability for Sustaining EOSC. This presentation will focus on the Financial Sustainability Task Force. The Task Force formed three "Working Streams" following the recommendation of the FAIR Lady Report to tackle the EOSC Core, Exchange, and Data Federation in smaller groups. Within the Data Federation Working Stream, the experts have identified many thematic data federations that have exisisted for quite some time, notably in environmental sciences, biodiversity, and social sciences. The case of Biodiversity Informatics is presented here as one of these sucess stories, retracing the history of major data federations such as GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), the CoL (Catalogue of Life), BHL (Biodiversity Hertiage Library) and how they managed to move from community-driven initiatitves to structurally funded research infrastructures supported by national and international governmental authorities with a long term perspective, leading to the establishment of infrastructures like the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) and LifeWatch. This presentation will also address the essential contributions of associations like TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) and CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) to achieving long-term sustainability and on how to successfully obtain complementary funds from EU projects in Horizon 2020 and its successor, Horizon Europe, with programs such as Synthesis of Systematic Resources (SYNTHESYS), DiSSCo Prepare, Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCiKL), and Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research, and Innovations (TETTRIs), to name a few.

Zen and the Art of Persistent Identifier Service Development for Digital Specimen

One of the most desired (and still missing) elements to enable the concept of Digital Extended (Webster et al. 2021) Specimens is a persistent identifier (PID) for the new digital specimen object. Digital Specimens are created to act as a digital surrogate of the physical objects. Digital Specimens contain all data relevant to the specimens as well as derived data like genetic sequences, trait information, and references to publications, species and environmental information. A PID for the Digital Specimen is thus essential to link it to the extended information. Furthermore, the extended information also needs PIDs to create unique and resolvable references to enable bidirectional linking. DiSSCo, Distributed System of Scientific Collections, has done extensive work to select the most appropriate PID scheme (Hardisty et al. 2021) and design a PID infrastructure for the pan-European specimen collections. The design was created in the Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library project (BiCIKL) with funding from the European Commission. The draft design has been discussed with technical specialists in the joint DiSSCo and Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) community, with international stakeholders like GBIF and iDigBio. The draft was also presented at the 2022 conference of SPNHC (the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections) for further feedback, after which it was finalised. This talk will provide a short overview of the key elements in the design of the Persistent Identifier system for Digital Specimens such as the metadata schema, a human friendly string format, and PID lifecycle with support for state changes of the physical object such as splitting and merging. We will illustrate this by showing the current status of development. The Digital Specimen forms the backbone of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) services (Addink et al. 2021) in development by the DiSSCo Prepare project, a project to prepare for the new research infrastructure which currently involves 170 institutions in 23 countries holding an estimated 1,5 billion specimens. The Digital Specimen is a FAIR Digital Object with a PID and machine actionable metadata to make it FAIR. The PID service ensures the identifiers’ integrity and preserves these linkages, improving the FAIR quality of all specimen data. The talk will describe the system design and current test deployment setup, as well as delve into a few technical details of the Handle Server architecture, PID Kernel records, and a roadmap for the service development. The design and test work are done under the auspices of the BiCIKL project that aims to foster collaboration between infrastructures and develop bidirectional connections between the data so that they become part of a big FAIR data pool seamlessly available to researchers (Penev et al. 2022).

Latimer Core: A new data standard for collection descriptions

The Latimer Core (LtC) schema, named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, is a standard designed to support the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass. Individual items within those groups are represented through other emerging or current standards (e.g., Darwin Core, ABCD). The LtC classes and properties aim to represent information that describes these groupings in enough detail to inform deeper discovery of the resources contained within them. The standard has been developed under the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Interest Group, and evolved from the earlier work of the Natural Collection Descriptions (NCD) group. Version 1 of the standard includes 23 classes, each with two or more properties (Fig. 1 and Suppl. material 1). The central concept of the standard is the ObjectGroup class, which represents 'an intentionally grouped set of objects with one or more common characteristics'. Arranged around the ObjectGroup are a set of classes that are commonly used to describe and classify the objects within the ObjectGroup, classes covering aspects of the custodianship, management and tracking of the collections, a generic class (MeasurementOrFact) for storing qualitative or quantitative measures within the standard, and a set of classes that are used to describe the structure and description of the dataset. Latimer Core is intended to be sufficiently flexible and scalable to apply to a wide range of collection description use cases, from describing the overall collections holdings of an institution to the contents of a single drawer of material. Various approaches are used to support this flexibility, including the use of generic classes to represent organisations, people, roles and identifiers, and enabling flexible relationships for constructing data models that meet different use cases. The collection description scheme concept is introduced to enable adopters to specify rules in the use of LtC within each specific implementation, demonstrated in Fig. 2. Guidance and reference examples for different modelling approaches to suit different use cases are provided in the LtC guidance documentation. The LtC standard has significant overlap with existing data standards (Suppl. material 2) that represent, for example, individual objects and occurrences, organisations, people and activities. Where possible, LtC has either borrowed terms directly from these standards or less formally aligned with them. Achieving a balance between offering a standard that is sufficiently comprehensive to stand alone and maintains a low technical barrier to adoption whilst minimalising duplication of effort in the context of the wider standards landscape is a notable challenge in the standard development process. The draft standard was submitted to the TDWG Executive in June 2022 to begin the process of formal review and ratification. This includes a list of standard terms and a GitHub wiki of guidance on the concepts behind and use of the standard. In the meantime, the Task Group will continue working on reference examples and serialisations, and working with infrastructures such as the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) consortium, the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Registry of Scientific Collections, the CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) Registry of Collections and the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) on potential roadmaps towards adoption. In this presentation, we will introduce the key Latimer Core deliverables, highlight some of the challenges faced in the development process, and discuss the potential for community adoption.

A botanical demonstration of the potential of linking data using unique identifiers for people.

Natural history collection data available digitally on the web have so far only made limited use of the potential of semantic links among themselves and with cross-disciplinary resources. In a pilot study, botanical collections of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have therefore begun to semantically annotate their collection data, starting with data on people, and to link them via a central index system. As a result, it is now possible to query data on collectors across different collections and automatically link them to a variety of external resources. The system is being continuously developed and is already in production use in an international collection portal.

GRSciColl: Registry of Scientific Collections maintained by the community for the community

GRSciColl: Registry of Scientific Collections maintained by the community for the community

A Data Standard for Dynamic Collection Descriptions

The utopian vision is of a future where a digital representation of each object in our collections is accessible through the internet and sustainably linked to other digital resources. This is a long term goal however, and in the meantime there is an urgent need to share data about our collections at a higher level with a range of stakeholders (Woodburn et al. 2020). To sustainably achieve this, and to aggregate this information across all natural science collections, the data need to be standardised (Johnston and Robinson 2002). To this end, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Interest Group has developed a data standard for describing collections, which is approaching formal review for ratification as a new TDWG standard. It proposes 20 classes (Suppl. material 1) and over 100 properties that can be used to describe, categorise, quantify, link and track digital representations of natural science collections, from high-level approximations to detailed breakdowns depending on the purpose of a particular implementation. The wide range of use cases identified for representing collection description data means that a flexible approach to the standard and the underlying modelling concepts is essential. These are centered around the ‘ObjectGroup’ (Fig. 1), a class that may represent any group (of any size) of physical collection objects, which have one or more common characteristics. This generic definition of the ‘collection’ in ‘collection descriptions’ is an important factor in making the standard flexible enough to support the breadth of use cases. For any use case or implementation, only a subset of classes and properties within the standard are likely to be relevant. In some cases, this subset may have little overlap with those selected for other use cases. This additional need for flexibility means that very few classes and properties, representing the core concepts, are proposed to be mandatory. Metrics, facts and narratives are represented in a normalised structure using an extended MeasurementOrFact class, so that these can be user-defined rather than constrained to a set identified by the standard. Finally, rather than a rigid underlying data model as part of the normative standard, documentation will be developed to provide guidance on how the classes in the standard may be related and quantified according to relational, dimensional and graph-like models. So, in summary, the standard has, by design, been made flexible enough to be used in a number of different ways. The corresponding risk is that it could be used in ways that may not deliver what is needed in terms of outputs, manageability and interoperability with other resources of collection-level or object-level data. To mitigate this, it is key for any new implementer of the standard to establish how it should be used in that particular instance, and define any necessary constraints within the wider scope of the standard and model. This is the concept of the ‘collection description scheme,’ a profile that defines elements such as: which classes and properties should be included, which should be mandatory, and which should be repeatable; which controlled vocabularies and hierarchies should be used to make the data interoperable; how the collections should be broken down into individual ObjectGroups and interlinked, and how the various classes should be related to each other. which classes and properties should be included, which should be mandatory, and which should be repeatable; which controlled vocabularies and hierarchies should be used to make the data interoperable; how the collections should be broken down into individual ObjectGroups and interlinked, and how the various classes should be related to each other. Various factors might influence these decisions, including the types of information that are relevant to the use case, whether quantitative metrics need to be captured and aggregated across collection descriptions, and how many resources can be dedicated to amassing and maintaining the data. This process has particular relevance to the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) consortium, the design of which incorporates use cases for storing, interlinking and reporting on the collections of its member institutions. These include helping users of the European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) (Islam 2020) to discover specimens for physical and digital loans by providing descriptions and breakdowns of the collections of holding institutions, and monitoring digitisation progress across European collections through a dynamic Collections Digitisation Dashboard. In addition, DiSSCo will be part of a global collections data ecosystem requiring interoperation with other infrastructures such as the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Registry of Scientific Collections, the CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) Registry of Collections and Index Herbariorum. In this presentation, we will introduce the draft standard and discuss the process of defining new collection description schemes using the standard and data model, and focus on DiSSCo requirements as examples of real-world collection descriptions use cases.

Towards a COST MOBILISE Guideline for Long Term Preservation and Archiving of Data Constructs from Scientific Collections Facilities

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding organisation for research and innovation networks. One of the objectives of the COSTAction called “Mobilising Data, Policies and Experts in Scientific Collections“ (MOBILISE) is to work on documents for expert training with broad involvement of professionals from the participating European countries. The guideline presented here in its general concept will address principles, strategies and standards for long term preservation and archiving of data constructs (data packages, data products) as addressed by and under control of the scientific collections community. The document is being developed as part of the MOBILISE Action targeted towards primarily scientific staff at natural scientific collection facilities, as well as management bodies of collections like museums, herbaria and information technology personnel less familiar with data archiving principles and routines. The challenges of big data storage and (distributed, cloud-based) storage solutions as well as that of data mirroring, backing up, synchronisation and publication in productive data environments are well addressed by documents, guidelines and online platforms, e.g., in the DISSCo knowledge base (see Hardisty et al. (2020)) and as part of concepts of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Archival processes and the resulting data constructs, however, are often left outside of the considerations. This is a large gap because archival issues are not only simple technical ones as addressed by the term “bit preservation” but also envisage a number of logical, functional, normative, administrative and semantic issues as addressed by the term “functional long-term archiving”. The main target digital object types addressed by this COST MOBILISE Guideline are data constructs called Digital or Digital Extended Specimens and data products with the persistent identifier assignment lying under the authority of scientific collections facilities. Such digital objects are specified according to the Digital Object Architecture (DOA , see Wittenburg et al. 2018) and similar abstract models introduced by Harjes et al. (2020) and Lannom et al. (2020). The scientific collection-specific types are defined following evolving concepts in the context of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), the research infrastructure DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections), and the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). Archival processes are described following the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) reference model. The archived objects should be reusable in the sense of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) guiding principles. Organisations like national (digital) archives, computing or professional (domain-specific) data centers as well as libraries might offer specific archiving services and act as partner organisations of scientific collections facilities. The guideline consists of key messages that have been defined. They address the collection community, especially the staff and leadership of taxonomic facilities. Aspects of several groups of stakeholders are discussed as well as cost models. The guideline does not recommend specific solutions for archiving software and workflows. Supplementary information is delivered via a wiki-based platform for the COST MOBILISE Archiving Working Group WG4.

Progress Out of a Pandemic: Global collections, data sharing, and changing standards of practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted all aspects of our lives, but has also spawned new opportunities. Months of multidisciplinary, global collaboration have explored the connections between natural history collections and COVID-19. Museums have unrivalled (and still largely untapped) potential to contribute data, methods, and expertise to prediction, mitigation, and prevention efforts related to zoonotic disease outbreaks (DiEuliis et al. 2016, Dunnum et al. 2017), and there is a clear need for ongoing collaboration across (at least) microbiology, disease ecology, and natural history collections. In addition, we note that the roadblocks to effective data access and integration related to microbes and their hosts are a microcosm of the larger data landscape; solving these issues in the context of COVID-19—from liberating data from publications to ensuring digital connections between voucher specimens and all derived viral genetic sequences—will improve biodiversity data access and use more broadly. Efforts since March 2020 have promoted collaboration across disciplines, international boundaries, and continents. At iDigBio, staff updated information about genetic/genomic resources available in US mammal collections; 24 records were added and information enhanced (Cortez and Soltis 2020). The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) formed a worldwide COVID-19 Task Force (TaF). A US-led group formed the ViralMuse Task Force, working in concert with the TaF. Activities of the TaF centered on four areas: building a hub to coalesce knowledge from this group in a central location – including mining mammals-of-the-world literature, improving the metadata shared when publishing sequence data, encouraging virologists to voucher in museum collections, and gathering critical research questions around zoonotic disease from the scientific community. Through an online public event, this TaF shared work to date and critical next steps. Ongoing efforts include further refinement of metadata requirements for deposition of viral genetic data to include host specimen voucher identifiers, development of methods for better integration of bat and pathogen data from the literature and databases, analysis of community surveys, and development of webinars, symposia, and publications to report the work of the TaF. Members of the ViralMuse group worked to raise awareness of the critical value of and need for museum experts, collections data, and samples in any analyses of zoonotic events. ViralMuse members (Cook et al. 2020) stressed the need for collaborative action to: develop guidelines for keeping samples of both pathogens and hosts. develop and implement metadata requirements for physical specimens and samples. expand investment in infrastructure, both cyber and physical, to support archives of biological materials. increase communication and development of new channels of dialogue and collaboration among museum scientists, microbiologists, bioinformaticians, biomedical professionals, and disease ecologists. enhance financial support and realize strong leadership from federal agencies, international partners, and private foundations to develop proactive, multi-disciplinary approaches to future pandemics (see also da Silva et al. 2020). develop guidelines for keeping samples of both pathogens and hosts. develop and implement metadata requirements for physical specimens and samples. expand investment in infrastructure, both cyber and physical, to support archives of biological materials. increase communication and development of new channels of dialogue and collaboration among museum scientists, microbiologists, bioinformaticians, biomedical professionals, and disease ecologists. enhance financial support and realize strong leadership from federal agencies, international partners, and private foundations to develop proactive, multi-disciplinary approaches to future pandemics (see also da Silva et al. 2020). ViralMuse continues to advance these goals. To reach a broader audience, we published an article in The Conversation (Soltis et al. 2020). A new project, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is aimed at enhancing existing published museum specimen data relevant to one potential reservoir of SARS-CoV-2, horseshoe bats (Mast and Paul 2020). NSF has also provided support to foster continued collaboration, infrastructure development, and integration of communities of practice concerning zoonotic diseases (Soltis and Paul 2020). From a TDWG perspective, issues relating to data access, data standards, and data integration require attention. Methods to liberate data from publications need to be expanded, and proposed metadata requirements for viral genetic sequences need to be implemented by international databases and adopted by the community. A summit on collections management software could help align efforts to both store and share the necessary host-pathogen information in standards-compliant formats that support discovery, access, and citation/attribution. A new and effective communication strategy is needed to develop an integrated research community (comprising the biodiversity, collections, data science, disease ecology, microbiology, and One Health communities) and to support needed changes in standards of practice (emphasizing vouchering, data standards, and data integration).

Unity in Variety: Developing a collection description standard by consensus

Digitisation and publication of museum specimen data is happening worldwide, but far from complete. Museums can start by sharing what they know about their holdings at a higher level, long before each object has its own record. Information about what is held in collections worldwide is needed by many stakeholders including collections managers, funders, researchers, policy-makers, industry, and educators. To aggregate this information from collections, the data need to be standardised (Johnston and Robinson 2002). So, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Task Group is developing a data standard for describing collections, which gives the ability to provide: automated metrics, using standardised collection descriptions and/or data derived from specimen datasets (e.g., counts of specimens) and a global registry of physical collections (i.e., digitised or non-digitised). automated metrics, using standardised collection descriptions and/or data derived from specimen datasets (e.g., counts of specimens) and a global registry of physical collections (i.e., digitised or non-digitised). Outputs will include a data model to underpin the new standard, and guidance and reference implementations for the practical use of the standard in institutional and collaborative data infrastructures. The Task Group employs a community-driven approach to standard development. With international participation, workshops at the Natural History Museum (London 2019) and the MOBILISE workshop (Warsaw 2020) allowed over 50 people to contribute this work. Our group organized online "barbecues" (BBQs) so that many more could contribute to standard definitions and address data model design challenges. Cloud-based tools (e.g., GitHub, Google Sheets) are used to organise and publish the group's work and make it easy to participate. A Wikibase instance is also used to test and demonstrate the model using real data. There are a range of global, regional, and national initiatives interested in the standard (see Task Group charter). Some, like GRSciColl (now at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)), Index Herbariorum (IH), and the iDigBio US Collections List are existing catalogues. Others, including the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), include collection descriptions as a key part of their near-term development plans. As part of the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ project, GBIF organized a virtual workshop: Advancing the Catalogue of the World's Natural History Collections to get international input for such a resource that would use this CD standard. Some major complexities present themselves in designing a standardised approach to represent collection descriptions data. It is not the first time that the natural science collections community has tried to address them (see the TDWG Natural Collections Description standard). Beyond natural sciences, the library community in particular gave thought to this (Heaney 2001, Johnston and Robinson 2002), noting significant difficulties. One hurdle is that collections may be broken down into different degrees of granularity according to different criteria, and may also overlap so that a single object can be represented in more than one collection description. Managing statistics such as numbers of objects is complex due to data gaps and variable degrees of certainty about collection contents. It also takes considerable effort from collections staff to generate structured data about their undigitised holdings. We need to support simple, high-level collection summaries as well as detailed quantitative data, and to be able to update as needed. We need a simple approach, but one that can also handle the complexities of data, scope, and social needs, for digitised and undigitised collections. The data standard itself is a defined set of classes and properties that can be used to represent groups of collection objects and their associated information. These incorporate common characteristics ('dimensions') by which we want to describe, group and break down our collections, metrics for quantifying those collections, and properties such as persistent identifiers for tracking collections and managing their digital counterparts. Existing terms from other standards (e.g. Darwin Core, ABCD) are re-used if possible. The data model (Fig. 1) underpinning the standard defines the relationships between those different classes, and ensures that the structure as well as the content are comparable across different datasets. It centres around the core concept of an 'object group', representing a set of physical objects that is defined by one or more dimensions (e.g., taxonomy and geographic origin), and linked to other entities such as the holding institution. To the object group, quantitative data about its contents are attached (e.g. counts of objects or taxa), along with more qualitative information describing the contents of the group as a whole. In this presentation, we will describe the draft standard and data model with examples of early adoption for real-world and example data. We will also discuss the vision of how the new standard may be adopted and its potential impact on collection discoverability across the collections community.

International Image Interoperability Framework: A unified approach to sharing images of natural history specimens?

Researchers have become accustomed to online access to data about specimens held in natural history collections. Over several decades, metadata standards have been developed to facilitate the sharing and aggregation of this data, notably Darwin Core and ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data) developed under the auspices of TDWG but other standards developed in other communities, have also proved useful notably EML (Ecological Metadata Language) and GML (Geography Markup Language). Data aggregators have arisen to both, drive standards development and take advantage of the vast number of records made available through this community effort. Examples include Atlas of Living Australia and spin off Atlas projects, EoL (Encyclopedia of Life), iDigBio, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), WFO (World Flora Online). There are still many “dark specimens” that are not visible to the web and efforts continue to digitise metadata on these objects and make them available. The vast majority of the data that has been liberated so far, has therefore been text based and the standards reflect this, although many institutions and projects are also producing large numbers of images and other media. There have been media extensions to some standards to accommodate the sharing of images and other multimedia formats. However, these are restricted to metadata about media objects rather than the exchange of media objects themselves. For example, two extensions to Darwin Core are Audubon Core, which is designed to “determine whether a particular resource or collection will be fit for some particular biodiversity science application before acquiring the media.” and the Simple Multimedia extension, which is a “simple extension for exchanging metadata about multimedia resources”. Therefore image exchange, in particular, has not used open standards. Projects have relied on transferring high resolution versions of images (e.g. submission of type specimen images to JSTOR) or cut down compressed versions (e.g. many herbarium specimens submitted to GBIF or Europeana). The network has not allowed access to high resolution versions of images as curated by the host institutions themselves beyond basic links to web pages. If high resolution images have been published in online catalogues, they have been made available using a hotchpotch of different technologies including the now defunct Java Applets and Adobe Flash player. The network has not supported different views of the same specimen or annotations of those views, or integration of audio and moving images. In an ideal world a researcher should be able to view and annotate images of specimens held across multiple collections in a unified way, and the host institutions should have access to those annotations and statistics on how their specimens are being used. How can we achieve this? The sharing of multimedia representations of objects online is not a problem unique to the biodiversity community. Scholars in museums and archives of all kinds are facing the same issues. In 2011 the British Library, Stanford University, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford University), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway), Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and Cornell University came together to develop an exchange standard called IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). This framework now consists of six APIs (Application Programming Interface), four stable and two in beta, to publish and integrate image and other multimedia resources in a uniform manner and has been adopted by many institutions and commercial partners in the digital humanities. Applications based on IIIF enable many of the features desired by biodiversity researchers. The notion of sharing and annotating specimen images is not new to the natural history community. MorphBank, founded in 1998, has grown to allow much of this desirable functionality but at the cost and fragility of being a centralised database. The question we should perhaps be asking is: how can we make the biodiversity data sharing network as a whole more like MorphBank? From 2019 to 2021, part of the EU-funded Synthesys+ programme will support the adoption of IIIF as a unified way to publish images of natural history specimens. We aim to have a set of exemplar institutions publishing IIIF manifests for some millions of specimens by the end of the project and one or more demonstration applications in place. We hope this will act as a catalyst for wider adoption in the natural history community. A key goal is to integrate image data served using IIIF with metadata available via CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) specimen identifiers. If IIIF were ubiquitous in the natural history community, building tools that implemented this functionality would be feasible. A brief demonstration of a herbarium specimen browser, Herbaria Mundi, will be given. It will illustrate how specimens hosted in different institutions can be manipulated in a single interface. The architecture that supports this behaviour will be explained and its challenges, by implementing the institutions discussed.

Wildlife collection for scientific purposes.

Illegal transfer of wildlife has 2 main purposes: trade and scientific research. Trade is the most common, whereas scientific research is much less common and unprofitable, yet still important. Biopiracy in science is often neglected despite that many researchers encounter it during their careers. The use of illegally acquired specimens is detected in different research fields, from scientists bioprospecting for new pharmacological substances, to taxonomists working on natural history collections, to researchers working in zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens. The practice can be due to a lack of knowledge about the permit requirements in different countries or, probably most often, to the generally high level of bureaucracy associated with rule compliance. Significant regulatory filters to avoid biopiracy can be provided by different stakeholders. Natural history collection hosts should adopt strict codes of conduct; editors of scientific publications should require authors to declare that all studied specimens were acquired legally and to cite museum catalog numbers as guarantee of best practices. Scientific societies should actively encourage publication in peer-reviewed journals of work in which specimens collected from the wild were used. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature could require newly designated types based on recently collected specimens to be accompanied by statements of deposition in recognized scientific or educational institutions. We also propose the creation of an online platform that gathers information about environmental regulations and permits required for scientific activities in different countries and respective responsible governmental agencies and the simplification of the bureaucracy related to regulating scientific activities. This would make regulations more agile and easier to comply with. The global biodiversity crisis means data need to be collected ever faster, but biopiracy is not the answer and undermines the credibility of science and researchers. It is critical to find a modus vivendi that promotes compliance with regulations and scientific progress.

CETAF Collection Dashboard: Mapping natural history collections diversity

Several initiatives aim to map the diversity of Natural History (NH) collections and standardise their descriptions. The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories (GRBio) is the most recent global registry. Unfortunately the server has been down since mid-2018 but the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) recently "rescued" this data. In addition to this, the One World Collection exercise is a set of high-level collection descriptors (size, group coverage and geographic distribution) supporting a common strategy between the largest world institutions. Despite these efforts, a large part of the NH collections remains digitally unavailable and digitisation at the specimen level will take several decades. A new NH collections dashboard is needed in order to harmonise the efforts of the institutions. The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) is a good place to introduce this excercise. CETAF’s members hold over half of the world’s NH collections, representing 80% of the world's bio- and geo-diversity. Most of these collections are now engaged in the preparation for the common process of the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo, European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure). Additionally in Belgium, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA), Meise Botanic Garden (MBG) and CETAF have joined efforts to set up a common research portal (Natural Heritage, BRAIN-be project). The goal is to link together several collection management systems (CMS) and to (re)create links between isolated collection items. The CETAF collections dashboard splits the information into small metadata units related to topics relevant to the collections (taxonomy, geographic distribution, digitisation strategy and coverage, stratigraphy, etc.). The model allows for the creation of new units without a complete modification of the database structure. All units are defined by the Dublin Core and by fields derived from the Innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage (ICEDIG) d2.3 deliverable (van Egmond et al. 2019). The object hierarchy allows for the creation of sub-collections and preserves the unity of the information. The CMS has an internal object database with a full index and a faceted search interface. It also has web services and XLS (Microsoft® Excel®) import/export functionalities. The collection dashboard also includes a complete workflow and access rights management at the object level. This is important for the information that is protected by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The dashboard is now being evaluated with the collections hosted by the partners of Natural Heritage. The system will be proposed to CETAF members and connections will be established with the international portals such as the GBIF or the future DiSSCo portal.

NaturalHeritage: Bridging Belgian natural history collections

The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) and Meise Botanic Garden house more than 50 million specimens covering all fields of natural history. While many different research topics have their own specificities, throughout the years it became apparent that with regards to collection data management, data publication and exchange via community standards, collection holding institutions face similar challenges (James et al. 2018, Rocha et al. 2014). In the past, these have been tackled in different ways by Belgian natural history institutions. In addition to local and national collaborations, there is a great need for a joint structure to share data between scientific institutions in Europe and beyond. It is the aim of large networks and infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), the Distributed System of Scientific collections (DiSSCo) and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) to further implement and improve these efforts, thereby gaining ever increasing efficiencies. In this context, the three institutions mentioned above, submitted the NaturalHeritage project (http://www.belspo.be/belspo/brain-be/themes_3_HebrHistoScien_en.stm) granted in 2017 by the Belgian Science Policy Service, which runs from 2017 to 2020. The project provides links among databases and services. The unique qualities of each database are maintained, while the information can be concentrated and exposed in a structured way via one access point. This approach aims also to link data that are unconnected at present (e.g. relationship between soil/substrate, vegetation and associated fauna) and to improve the cross-validation of data. (1) The NaturalHeritage prototype (http://www.naturalheritage.be) is a shared research portal with an open access infrastructure, which is still in the development phase. Its backbone is an ElasticSearch catalogue, with Kibana, and a Python aggregator gathering several types of (re)sources: relational databases, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) services of objects databases and bibliographical data, collections metadata and the GBIF Internet Publishing Toolkit (IPT) for observational and taxonomical data. Semi-structured data in English are semantically analysed and linked to a rich autocomplete mechanism. Keywords and identifiers are indexed and grouped in four categories (“what”, “who”, “where”, “when”). The portal can act also as an Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) service and ease indexing of the original webpage on the internet with microdata enrichment. (2) The collection data management system of DaRWIN (Data Research Warehouse Information Network) of RBINS and RMCA has been improved as well. External (meta)data requirements, i.e. foremost publication into or according to the practices and standards of GBIF and OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System: https://obis.org) for biodiversity data, and INSPIRE (https://inspire.ec.europa.eu) for geological data, have been identified and evaluated. New and extended data structures have been created to be compliant with these standards, as well as the necessary procedures developed to expose the data. Quality control tools for taxonomic and geographic names have been developed. Geographic names can be hard to confirm as their lack of context often requires human validation. To address this a similarity measure is used to help map the result. Species, locations, sampling devices and other properties have been mapped to the World Register of Marine Species and DarwinCore (http://www.marinespecies.org), Marine Regions and GeoNames, the AGRO Agronomy and Vertebrate trait ontologies and the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) vocabularies (http://www.obofoundry.org/ontology/agro.html). Extensive mapping is necessary to make use of the ExtendedMeasurementOrFact Extension of DarwinCore (https://tools.gbif.org/dwca-validator/extensions.do). External (meta)data requirements, i.e. foremost publication into or according to the practices and standards of GBIF and OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System: https://obis.org) for biodiversity data, and INSPIRE (https://inspire.ec.europa.eu) for geological data, have been identified and evaluated. New and extended data structures have been created to be compliant with these standards, as well as the necessary procedures developed to expose the data. Quality control tools for taxonomic and geographic names have been developed. Geographic names can be hard to confirm as their lack of context often requires human validation. To address this a similarity measure is used to help map the result. Species, locations, sampling devices and other properties have been mapped to the World Register of Marine Species and DarwinCore (http://www.marinespecies.org), Marine Regions and GeoNames, the AGRO Agronomy and Vertebrate trait ontologies and the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) vocabularies (http://www.obofoundry.org/ontology/agro.html). Extensive mapping is necessary to make use of the ExtendedMeasurementOrFact Extension of DarwinCore (https://tools.gbif.org/dwca-validator/extensions.do).

Collections Digitization and Assessment Dashboard, a Tool for Supporting Informed Decisions

Natural Science Collections (NSCs) contain specimen-related data from which we extract valuable information for science and policy. Openness of those collections facilitates development of science. Moreover, virtual accessibility to physical containers by means of their digitization will allow an exponential increase in the level of available information. Digitization of collections will allow us to set a comprehensive registry of reliable, accurate, updated, comparable and interconnected information. Equally, the scope of interested potential users will largely expand and so will the different levels of granularity required by researchers, institutions and governmental bodies. Meeting diverse needs entails a special effort in data management and data analysis to extract, digest and present information on a compressed but still precise and objective-oriented format. The Collections Digitisation Dashboard (CDD) underpins such an attempt. The CDD stands as a practical tool that specifically aims to support high-level decisions with a wide coverage of data, by providing a visual, simplified and structured arrangement that will allow discovery of key indicators concerning digitization of bio- and geodiversity collections. The realm of possible approaches to the CDD covers levels of digitization, collection exceptionality, resourceavailability and many others. Still all those different angles need to be aligned and processed at once to provide an overall overview of the status of NSCs in the digitization process and analyse its further development. The CDD is a powerful mechanism to identify priorities, specialisation lines together with regional development, gaps and niches and future capabilities as well, and strengths and weaknesses across collections, institutions, countries and regions. It can perfectly underpin measurable and comparable assessments, with evolution indexes and progress indicators, all under an overarching homogenous approach. The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) Research Infrastructure, currently in its preparatory phase, is built on top of the largest ever community of collections-related institutions across Europe and anchored on the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF). It aims to provide a unique virtual access point to NSCs by facilitating a large and massive digitisation effort throughout Europe. Setting up priorities and specialization areas is pivotal to its success. To that end, the DiSSCo CDD will provide a valuation tool to summarize and showcase NSC's digitization status on a first-hand visualization. Different projects and initiatives will contribute, jointly and on a synergetic basis, to the production of the DiSSCo CDD. The ICEDIG project will address its basics features, terms of classification and tiers of information, and will produce a prototype and a set of recommendations on how to better attempt a massive dashboard by collating specific collections-based information and defining global strategic representations. CETAF working groups on collections and digitization will provide the desired homogeneity in describing and capturing the different implementation requirements from the users’ perspectives, which will be complemented by the contributions made under the umbrella of the COST Action MOBILISE. The Action will use networking activities to identify the right standards and policies to enable enlarging the scope of the DiSSCo CDD and its broader implementation by linking to the TDWG criteria and adopted standards. Complementarily, the ELViS platform to be developed under the SYNTHESYS+ project will provide the right virtual environment. Furthermore, SYNTHESYS+ will address the assessment capabilities of the CDD to enable the visual representation becoming a practical assessment mechanism and endow it with a dynamic feature for analysis over the time. The DiSSCo CDD will thus become an instrumental mechanism for decision-taking that will be embedded into the clustering initiative of products and services provided to the EOSCby the ENVRI-FAIR project in the environmental domain.

Hazards and Disasters in the Geological and Geomorphological record: A key to understanding past and future hazards and disasters and their impact on life

Hazards and disasters have occurred throughout Earth's History and thus the geological record is an important resource for understanding future hazards and disasters and its Impact. The Earth Science Group (ESG) of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) carried out a “Hazard and Disaster Event Survey” to identify Earth Science collections in European museums that represent hazards and disasters throughout the geological record, and recent times. The aim is to use the collections within the survey as an educational and research resource that promotes the importance of museum collections for understanding past and future hazard and disaster events. The survey pinpointed a wide variety of hazards (e.g. earthquakes, volcanism, floods, impact events, etc.), representing a vast time span in Earth’s history (Proterozoic to Holocene), that are documented in the collections of the participating museums. Each hazard and disaster event has been described in terms of how each is preserved (e.g. fossil record or rock record), spatial scale, impact on life and biodiversity, and geological age. The results were published in Research ideas and outcomes journal RIO (https://riojournal.com/article/34087/) as seven examples, which include well-known and less-known events from the survey that have contributed to our understanding of hazard and disaster processes and their impact on life and biodiversity. For better visualisation and education purposes we also created and specialised website, which will be launched during summer 2019. In the presentation we will talk about general conclusions and lessons learnt from the “Hazard and Disaster Event Survey”.