Bridging the biodiversity data gaps: Recommendations to meet users’ data needs

Freely available high quality, data on species occurrence and associated variables are needed in order to track changes in biodiversity. One of the main issues surrounding the provision of such data is that sources vary in quality, scope, and accuracy. Publishers of such data must face the challenge of maximizing quality, utility and breadth of data coverage, in order to make such data useful to users. With the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), we recently conducted a content needs assessment survey to consolidate and synthesize major user needs regarding biodiversity data. We find a broad range of recommendations from the survey respondents, principally concerning issues such as data quality, bias, and coverage, and ease of access. We recommend a candidate set of actions for the GBIF that fall into three classes: 1) addressing data gaps, data volume, and data quality, 2) aggregating data types that are relatively new to GBIF, to support emerging new applications, and 3) promoting ease-of-use and providing incentives for wider use. Addressing the challenge of providing high quality primary biodiversity data potentially can serve the needs of national and international biodiversity initiatives. These include the "flexible framework" for addressing the new 2020 biodiversity targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the global biodiversity observation network (GEO BON) and the new Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Each of these presents opportunities for countries to define appropriate actions and corresponding data needs, with links from local to global scales.