Library Guides: Biological Sciences Data Repositories: Ecology and Evolution

Data Repository Quick Links

Ecology and Evolution Data Repositories

Global Biodiversity Information Facility
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) has over 15000 datasets about all types of life on earth which can be searched by occurrences, species, and countries.
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GBIF also offers tools and advice for publishing biodiversity datasets to promote discovery and citations.
Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB)
The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) is an international repository intended to facilitate ecological and environmental research. As part of the KNB effort, data management software is developed in a free and open source manner, so other groups can build upon the tools. The KNB is powered by the Metacat data management system, and is optimized for handling data sets described using the Ecological Metadata Language, but can store any XML-based metadata document.
Natural History Museum (UK) Data Portal
The natural history collection data portal consists of specimens from the Museum's collection database including records from zoology, botany, mineralogy, paleontology, and entomology collections.
Dryad
Dryad’s vision is to promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely re-used to create knowledge. Our mission is to provide the infrastructure for, and promote the re-use of, data underlying the scholarly literature.

Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories

GRBio is the first-ever consolidated, comprehensive clearinghouse of information about biological collections in natural history museums, herbaria, and other biorepositories. This online-registry is a source for authoritative information about collections as well as validated, standardized data such as addresses, contacts, and values for the Darwin Core identifiers for institutions (institutionCode) and collections (collectionCode). Personal collections can also be registered here, whether they belong to private collectors or are research collections that haven't yet been accessioned into an institutional collection.

Find an institutional or project collection in their registry.

Add records to the collection

Ecology and Evolution Metadata Standards

Ecological Metadata Language
Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata specification developed by the ecology discipline and for the ecology discipline.
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It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and associated efforts (Michener et al., 1997, Ecological Applications). EML is implemented as a series of XML document types that can by used in a modular and extensible manner to document ecological data. Each EML module is designed to describe one logical part of the total metadata that should be included with any ecological dataset.

Darwin Core
The Darwin Core is body of standards. It includes a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries. The Darwin Core is primarily based on taxa, their occurrence in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and related information. Included are documents describing how these terms are managed, how the set of terms can be extended for new purposes, and how the terms can be used. The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework [RDF] and is the definitive resource to understand the term definitions and their relationships to each other. The Simple Darwin Core [SIMPLEDWC] is a specification for one particular way to use the terms - to share data about taxa and their occurrences in a simply structured way - and is probably what is meant if someone suggests to "format your data according to the Darwin Core".
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It includes a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries. The Darwin Core is primarily based on taxa, their occurrence in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and related information. Included are documents describing how these terms are managed, how the set of terms can be extended for new purposes, and how the terms can be used. The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework [RDF] and is the definitive resource to understand the term definitions and their relationships to each other. The Simple Darwin Core [SIMPLEDWC] is a specification for one particular way to use the terms - to share data about taxa and their occurrences in a simply structured way - and is probably what is meant if someone suggests to "format your data according to the Darwin Core"