MarBEF data management

Fishing for data

Scientific data on marine biodiversity is very much fragmented and scattered over many laboratories all over the world. They are often only available on paper or in old electronic formats, stored away and at risk of getting lost. In the past, many research expeditions have gathered biodiversity data which has been funded by government bodies, i.e. taxpayers’ money. The results of these surveys produced enormous quantities of data which could potentially be of huge importance to the scientific community and yet they sit gathering dust on a shelf – a crime to society!

MarBEF scientists recognised this problem and consequently built a framework and infrastructure to increase the availability and sharing of data which was previously at risk of being lost. Now all this data has been quality controlled and brought together in a single, properly archived system where it will remain available for future generations.

The key for obtaining data was the creation of the "[www.marbef.org/projects/manuela/documents/MDMU_final.doc Declaration of Mutual Understanding for Data-sharing]". This document provided a solid basis of trust between MarBEF and non-MarBEF data providers. It resulted in the collection of 251 datasets provided by more than 100 scientists from 94 institutions in 17 countries.