The Global Biodiversity Information Facility has signed a new five-year contract with the European Union (EU) that will support a new cycle of data mobilisation and capacity development projects through its flagship Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) programme.
The renewed funding from the European Commission’s Directorate General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA) represents a vote of confidence in BID’s effectiveness in helping countries in the target regions meet their biodiversity knowledge needs under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
GBIF will now launch a call for grant proposals in 2025 in an outreach that will support and compliment its work on biodiversity data cubes – a complementary GBIF initiative, which could help make data mobilised through the grants more useable for corporations for nature disclosures.
A data cube is a multidimensional representation of data that allows for efficient storage, retrieval, and analysis of information along multiple dimensions. In the context of biodiversity data, a data cube can integrate various dimensions such as taxonomic (what), temporal (when) and spatial (where), enabling researchers to explore complex ecological patterns and relationships more effectively.
GBIF is working on cubes with EU-funded partner initiative, Biodiversity Building Blocks for Policy.
Kyle Copas, communications manager at the GBIF, said that the 2025 grants are likely to be worth between €20,000-60,000, and will be available for projects based in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific region to identify and prioritise specific gaps in capacity as well as taxonomic and geographic information in these areas.
Their recommendations, along with those of a renewed BID programme steering committee, will help set key criteria for selecting a portfolio of data mobilisation projects in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific islands, with a first call for project proposals are expected in 2025.
Copas said, “We’re looking to improve the evidence base in areas that historically have been data poor and in countries where they haven’t had resources to invest in the digitisation of open by diversity data. These are data holding institutions that have existing sources of data that’s not currently available through GBF, but can be digitised, reshaped, standardised, so that it can be made available.”
Thierry Dudermel, team leader for biodiversity at DG INTPA, said, “GBIF’s BID programme has demonstrated its effectiveness at filling information gaps, but its approach to capacity development has been transformative in achieving its goals for data mobilisation and use. The impact of enhancing skills and capacities that individuals and institutions gain through training workshops—and extend through replication events—serves to sustaining future biodiversity research and other activities.”
Joe Miller, GBIF executive secretary, said, “BID has consistently increased the availability and use of open data on biodiversity while also establishing new national, regional and global collaborations. We expect this new agreement will yield further accomplishments, reinforcing the findings of the external evaluation that highlighted how the programme has empowered the GBIF network, narrowed knowledge gaps, and improved data skills and quality across our regional communities of practice.”
The €4 million in funding from DG INTPA will extend BID’s next phase of activities in the three original target regions and brings the total EU investment in the programme between 2015 and 2029 to €9.5 million.
Find out about Biodiversity Building Blocks for Policy data cubes