Open biodiversity data plays a key role in supporting the achievement of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular, SDGs 14 (Life below Water) and 15 (Life on Land) and aligns with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science adopted in 2021.
In this example, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) GBIF node conducted a literature study to better understand the role and influence of GBIF in advancing the SDG goals and Open Science in Asia.
"Our study showed us that biodiversity data has direct and indirect contributions in achieving SDGs", said Dr Xu Zheping, GBIF Node manager at CAS. He continued: "It's clear that we need big biodiversity data, models and techniques to meet the needs of research and policy—and for that, GBIF plays an important role."
Dr Xu and colleagues extracted data on literature drawn from the Dimensions research information dataset which include filters for research into the 17 SDGs for more than five millions publications available in the dataset tagged using machine learning and semi-automatically generated training data.
Focusing on studies mentioning GBIF in Asia, published after 2016, the researchers were able to extract a list of papers with SDG classifiers as a basis for further investigation. The individual papers were analysed for scope, countries involved, GBIF data used and use of or contribution to open science.
From the results the researchers were able to identify research papers across nearly all SDGs, including the below examples, also described in detail in the attached presentation:
This work can easily be extended to other continents, regions and countries, using Dimensions and/or the GBIF literature database. Other nodes can contact the CAS node for details on the study.
