Introducing ChecklistBank: An index and repository for taxonomic data

As a joint development between Catalogue of Life (COL) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), ChecklistBank supports the publication and curation of checklists and provides a platform for their consistent discovery, use and citation. GBIF has for some time maintained ChecklistBank as its repository for its community to share species checklist data and to drive species searches on GBIF. The collaboration built on an earlierversion, to add functions needed to assemble the COL Checklist (Bánki et al. 2022) and to make it an independent system. Its data model is built around the Catalogue of Life Data Package (ColDP) format (Döring and Ower 2019), the preferred standard for sharing data with ChecklistBank. Since December 2020, ChecklistBank is actively being used to host all of the COL data sources and produce the integrated COL Checklist. We will introduce the fundamental ideas of ChecklistBank, the tools currently offered to users and explore ideas of mapping checklists to taxon concepts.