ABSTRACT
About 2 to 3 billion specimens (Krishtalka and Humphrey, 2000) are currently preserved in the world’s natural history collections, a major source for primary biodiversity data (Chapter 2; Graham et al., 2004). Each of these specimens provides a single data point, documenting the occurrence of an individual of a particular species at a particular geographic locality and at a particular point in time. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; https://www.gbif.org) was established to encourage the provision of such data in digitized form and to enable broad access to biological databases worldwide. Biodiversity data are often local or national, with the data collected independently and maintained in unconnected electronic archives, if digitized at all, without any control for interoperability with other databases. Quite
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................. 165 Availability of Primary Biodiversity Data .................................................................................................................. 165 Importance of Georeferenced Biodiversity Data ........................................................................................................166 Mountains as Tools to Explore Environmental Control of Latitudinal and Elevational Diversity Gradients .............166 Mining Biodiversity Data: Integrating Approaches .................................................................................................... 167 Georeferenced Databases as Management Tools for Nature Conservation ................................................................ 168 Niche Dynamics Modeling to Explain the Past and Predict the Future ...................................................................... 168 GMBA Mountain Portal .............................................................................................................................................. 168 References ................................................................................................................................................................... 168
often it is only through the linking of data from different sources that scientifi c advance is achieved, because an individual (mostly regional) database commonly does not contain suffi cient information for developing and testing general theory and furthering broad understanding. Therefore, GBIF, with all its forty-seven member countries and thirty-fi ve international partner organizations, has committed itself to “improving the accessibility, completeness and interoperability of biodiversity data bases.” GBIF has established a data portal that connects more than 150 million biodiversity records that adhere to interoperable standards for data sharing. GBIF further facilitates data mining by linking data to an electronic catalogue of names of known organisms (Catalogue of Life, https://www.catalogueofl ife.org) and by developing standards in biodiversity informatics (Lane and Edwards, 2007). Many more Web functionalities exist, most of them not even imagined yet.
