Skip to main content

Research Projects

Current projects

TETTRIs

TETTRIs (EU, 2022-2026) aims to produce a transformative change in the role played by taxonomy in tackling biodiversity challenges by boosting taxonomic capacity and transferring critical scientific knowledge to societal actors

The community of facilities, collections and experts gathered around CETAF envisions that the taxonomic knowledge and expertise required to study, protect and manage biological diversity throughout Europe become easily and openly accessible, sustained over time and integrated into decision-making processes. To achieve that, TETTRIs contributes to Transform Taxonomy in Europe trough:

  • Training: Advancing taxonomist workforce, with capacity building and training programmes to facilitate the continuous upgrade of competencies and skills.
  • Research Transfer: Engaging citizen scientists in natural sciences, as key actors in co-generating taxonomic knowledge and collecting biodiversity data.
  • Innovation: Developing innovative methods and digital solutions to improve taxonomic knowledge, support integrative and comprehensive taxonomy, speed up species discovery and description, and making collections and knowledge available at large scale.

In TETTRIs, the BGBM deals with the opimisation of EU Nomen Services and the processes for aggregating the underlying data. Another topic is the provision and documentation of workflows to link locally used taxonomies with European and international taxonomic backbone services.

Die Herbonauten

"Die Herbonauten – Das Herbar der Bürgerwissenschaften" (2016 - 2024) involves citizen scientists in a participatory and interactive format in the capturing of herbarium labels for the databases of the BO. The maintenance as well as the expansion and further development of the platform in relevance to current research questions at the BO as well as to research questions in the context of citizen science is funded by the "Verein der Freunde e.V." of the Botanic Garden Berlin. "Die Herbonauten" thus contribute to the free and open accessibility of biodiversity data worldwide as well as to an increase and networking of biodiversity knowledge.

GGBN-Tec

99 partner institutions from 33 countries make more than 3 million DNA and tissue samples from their biological collections digitally accessible - that is the current track record of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN), founded in 2011. The international network has set itself the goal of strengthening research into biological diversity and ensuring its preservation through the worldwide exchange of knowledge and materials. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is now funding the development of the GGBN's digital infrastructure with 0.8 million euros. The project, which is scheduled to run for five years (2022 - 2026), is being led by the Botanic Garden Berlin of the Freie Universität Berlin.

NFDI4Biodiversity

NFDI4BioDiversity is a consortium of 49 partners dedicated to deliver practical tools for researchers and improve data availability for environmental studies/ecology. We are part of a greater network within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), which is funded through a 10-year-programme of the Joint Science Minister Conference in Germany (GWK). Starting in October 2020, the first funding phase runs for five years until September 2025.

BiCIKL

BiCIKL will catalyse a culture change in the way biodiversity data is identified, linked, integrated and re-used across the research cycle. We will cultivate a more transparent, trustworthy and efficient research ecosystem.

BiCIKL will launch a new European starting community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in the biodiversity and life sciences based on open science practices through access to data, tools and services.

DiSSCoPrepare

DiSSCo officially launched its preparatory phase in February 2020 with DiSSCo Prepare, the primary vehicle through which DiSSCo will reach the overall readiness necessary for its construction and eventual operation.

To achieve construction readiness, DiSSCo Prepare will develop a comprehensive Construction Masterplan around five critical implementation areas: technical readiness, scientific readiness, data readiness, organisational readiness and financial readiness.

Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI)

www.Europeana.eu is the cross-domain central portal to Europe’s digitized cultural and scientific heritage. The portal links to almost 50 million of digital objects from Europe’s museums, galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual collections. Europeana’s vision is to make cultural heritage as easily accessible and as freely reusable as possible. The Europeana DSI project aims to ensure the continued operation of the Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI) and to facilitate the transition of the Europeana website from a portal to a multi-sided platform, offering a variety of services to data providers, end users and re-users. The Freie Universität Berlin on behalf the OpenUp! network is involved in Work Package 1 focussing on the innovation of the aggregation infrastructure. Key objectives are to make it easier for providers to add their content to the Europeana site; improve the quality of metadata and the quantity of digital objects available; and increase the amount of objects with open licencing conditions.
 
OpenUp! is a growing network of European institutions providing natural history objects to Europeana. This includes digitized specimens, natural history artwork, animal sounds, and videos. The OpenUp! natural history aggregator for Europeana is coordinated by the Freie Universität Berlin, Botanic Garden und Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM). Collections provide standardised metadata via the BioCASe Provider Software (Biological Collection Access Service) or the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), feeding into the aggregation process that includes the harvest, transformation and transfer of metadata to Europeana. During the process scientific metadata items are enriched by literature references, geo names, and common names of plants and animals to increase the accessibility of objects by non-scientific users. So far, 23 partners from 12 European countries take part in the OpenUp! network and contribute 2.2 million records. Data providers benefit from reaching new audiences, increasing web traffic to institutional websites and gaining better visibility towards research funding organizations and within society.
 

The Europeana DSI project is funded under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) that supports trans-European networks and infrastructures in the sectors of transport, telecommunications and energy.

SYNTHESYS, SYNTHESYS-2, SYNTHESYS-3 and SYNTHESYS Plus

SYNTHESYS aims to produce an accessible, integrated European resource for research users in the natural sciences. SYNTHESYS will create a shared, high quality approach to the management, preservation, and access to leading European natural history collections.

A core element in SYNTHESYS is to provide funded researcher visits (Access) to the 390,000,000 specimens housed by SYNTHESYS institutions. In particular, the 4,049,800 type specimens. Alongside the Access, a Joint Research Activity (JRA) aims to improve the quality of and increase access to digital collections and data within natural history institutions by developing virtual collections. Network Activities (NA) will provide enhanced quality and quantity of online collections information to virtual Users and will implement best practice benchmarks in collections care to raise standards and improve accessibility to collections for all physical Users.

The BGBM co-leads work package NA3 (Molecular Collections in the age of genomics - Standards & Processes) and leads task 4.2 (Adoption and development of the CETAF stable identifier framework).

SYNTHESYS Plus is the fourth iteration (1 February 2019 - 31 January 2023) of the SYNTHESYS programme, funded by the European Commission.
 

Permanent online resources

Phycobank (Aufbau einer globalen Registration und eines Indexes für Wissenschaftliche Namen und Typen von Algen)

PhycoBank is the registration system for nomenclatural acts (new names, new combinations and types) of algae. Algae are a very diverse group of organisms and are covered by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants, ICN. PhycoBank will serve both the scientific phycological community and the international open access biodiversity information infrastructures.
 
During its first phase, the project developed a fully functional prototype of an annotation data repository for complex and cross-linked data including back-end server functionality, web services and an on-line user interface. Main objectives of the current project phase are (1) rolling out the software to major biodiversity portals in order to further establish the system and methodology in the domain and to gather user input for improving the interface and procedures. This will include extensions of the types of biodiversity content handled by the system and (2) extending the generic qualities of AnnoSys to further structured data formats including non-XML-based standards with machine readable explicit semantic concepts, and thus opening up the data gathered through AnnoSys for the Semantic Web and Open Data. This will also include the investigation and integration with other annotation systems based on the W3 Open Annotation Community Group standard.
 
The 3-year project (2016-2019) was funded by the LIS-Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Coordination of the GBIF-D Node System and the Botanical Node

Germany is one of the founding nations of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Main objective of the GBIF-D project is the focussed collection and mobilisation of suitable data within Germany's research community and natural history collections as well as of the available observation data.

The BGBM is coordinating this 6-partner project to ensure the technical and organisational cohesion of the eight Nodes in the German GBIF system:  

 

•             BGBM Berlin-Dahlem responsible for Coordination

•             DSMZ Braunschweig responsible for Bacteria & Archaea

•             BGBM Berlin-Dahlem responsible for Plants & Protists

•             BSM München responsible for Fungi & Lichens

•             MfN Berlin responsible for Insects

•             ZSM München responsible for Invertebrates II

•             Senckenberg Frankfurt responsible for Invertebrates III

•             ZFMK Bonn responsible for Vertebrates

•             MfN Berlin responsible for Fossils

 

The German Botanical Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility has been established at the BGBM in close collaboration with ten German botanical institutions and five other partner institutions as part of the German contribution to GBIF International. It represents all flowering plants, ferns, and mosses and also puts a special accent on algae and protists.The project at the BGBM supports the German botanical community in their efforts to mobilise botanical data using the BioCASE software and to create a German Virtual Herbarium.

 

OpenUp! - Opening up the European Natural History Heritage for EUROPEANA

The institutions participating in OpenUp! will provide over one million multimedia objects from the natural history domain to Europeana, the European Virtual Library (www.europeana.eu). OpenUp! is complementary to the eContentPlus project Biodiversity Heritage Library Europe, which mobilised digitised literature in the natural history domain. OpenUp! is an initiative of members of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) and several European nodes of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). 
The BGBM is responsible for the overall coordination of OpenUp! and provides high-quality herbarium images to the system. 

 

European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy - EDIT, Platform for Cybertaxonomy

The overall objective of EDIT was to integrate European taxonomic effort within the European Research Area and to build a world leading capacity. EDIT work-package 5 was lead by the BGBM and created the “Internet Platform for Cybertaxonomy”.

The EDIT Platform is an integrated software suite providing tools and support of the entire taxonomic workflow that leads to the creation of taxonomic monographs, checklists, flora and fauna treatments. 
The software is further developed, promoted and sustained in the framework of several projects and as a core activity of the BGBM’s Biodiversity Informatics Research Group.

European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy – EDIT Cichorieae examplar group.

In the workpackage "Unifying revisionary taxonomy" of the EDIT project the BGBM created an exemplar site using the EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy. The Cichorieae network is sustained by the BGBM’s Asterales Research Group.

DNA Bank Network and Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN)

The Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem is a founding member and the coordinator of the DNA Bank Network. The DNA Bank Network was established in spring 2007 and was funded until 2011 by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The network was initiated by GBIF Germany (Global Biodiversity Information Facility). It offers a worldwide unique concept based on GBIF and BioCASe. DNA bank databases of all partners are linked and are accessible via a central web portal, providing DNA samples of complementary collections (microorganisms, protists, plants, algae, fungi and animals).
In 2011 the Global Genome Biodiversity Network has been founded by the DNA Bank Network, as well as GBIF, Smithsonian Institution, Natural History Museum London, Natural History Museum Denmark and many others. At present more than 29 DNA and tissue banks are GGBN members. The existing data portal of the DNA Bank Network will serve as the data portal for GGBN in the near future. The aim is to provide all available samples from all GGBN partners via this central data portal and to build a knowledge platform on non-human biobanking.
The GGBN/DNA Bank Network data portal is further developed, promoted and sustained in the framework of other projects and as a core activity of the BGBM’s Biodiversity Informatics Research Group.


PESI /EU-Nomen

PESI stands for Pan-European Species directories Infrastructure. Authoritative species name registers are not only essential for taxonomy but important for information systems dealing with species of conservation, pest or commercial relevance as well. PESI enhances the quality and reliability of such European registers by integrating community networks of taxonomic experts into a joint work programme. 
In the project (2008-2011, funded by the EU under FP7) the BGBM lead the integration of the European Register of Marine Species, Fauna Europaea and Euro+Med Plantbase into a joint information system. The joint PESI infrastructure is maintained with the partners as an activity of the BGBM’s Biodiversity Informatics Group and in projects such as EU-BON.


Digital specimen images at the Herbarium Berolinense (B)

Since 2004, high resolution digital camera equipment is used to produce digital images of herbarium specimens. The digitisation of type specimens and some of the important collections such as the Herbaria Willdenow and Bridel were and are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation in the framework of the Global Plant Initiative.The German Virtual Herbarium is part of the GBIF-D project financed by the Federal Ministry of Research and Education, which also provided the funding for a large scale improvement of the underlying hardware in 2010. Contributing digitisation activities are also taking place as part of the BGBM’s loan system, and have been supported by the Association of Friends of the BGBM.


A Biological Collection Access Service for Europe: BioCASE

Originally a 35-partner research and development project co-ordinated by the BGBM, starting  Nov. 1, 2001 financed under the EU's 5th Framework Programme, Research Infrastructures until Jan. 31, 2005. Since then, the suit of software and activities in the area of has become one of . The BGBM is responsible for over-all co-ordination and for the development of the access system. The initiative is sustained in the framework of SYNTHESYS, GBIF-D and as a core activity of the BGBM’s Biodiversity Informatics Research Group.