Final Report of the Task Group on GBIF Data Fitness for Use in Agrobiodiversity

Human wellbeing and food security in a changing climate depend on productive and sustainable agriculture. For this, policies based on analyses and research results are vital to establish conservation priorities of natural resources that underpin the enhancement of sustainable food production. Therefore, data from agrobiodiversity and wider biodiversity sources are required to be available and accessible. Currently, there is a risk that agrobiodiversity and the wider biodiversity data communities remain separated with inefficient data aggregation, unless data flow pathways are harmonized. GBIF has a role to play in contributing to the convergence of the two communities. Biodiversity data in particular on wild relatives of the cultivated species will flow easier into agrobiodiversity conservation priority assessments and analysis with agrobiodiversity data integrated in GBIF. The Task Group on Data Fitness for Use in Agrobiodiversity was established by the GBIF Secretariat and Bioversity International to help improve the fit of data related to agrobiodiversity to the variety of important uses required and requested by the community of research and policy. The task group has been looking at the key actions for creating interoperability of data on ex situ, in situ and on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity, with a focus on plants. A survey and interviews of selected experts and ABD data practitioners were conducted to collect feedback on fitness for use and issues with GBIF-mediated data. The 53 recommendations of the task group cover the whole data flow, from publishing to data use with a focus on agrobiodiversity, also considering the role of nodes in data mobilization and in promotion and training. Some key recommendations are to (i) promote GBIF to the agrobiodiversity community, (ii) integrate the terms from the long-standing Multi Crop Passport Data standard (MCPD) already used for several decades by agricultural gene banks into Darwin Core indexed attributes, (iii) by installing proper governance, the Darwin Core germplasm extension can be maintained as a stable international standard, (iv) develop agrobiodiversity user profiles on GBIF data portal to improve the user experience in accessing data of interest, (v) add infraspecific taxonomy levels to ensure adequate publication of agrobiodiversity data, by means of integrating into the GBIF taxonomic backbone the reference taxonomies used by the community with additional attributes related to the crop