In a new publication by MOBI lab members (Tschernosterova et al. 2023 Biodiversity Data Journal), we present a template for biodiversity databases that can store historical data on species inventories.

Biodiversity inventory is an event during which one or more experts survey a given site for all species, the experts report their survey methodology and effort, together with the list of species that they detect, sometimes with information on abundances or population densities. Inventories present a more valuable sources of data than presence-only observations aggregated by, e.g., GBIF. Literature is full of published inventories, and so mobilizing and digitizing them would be super valuable. However, the existing Darwin Core standard (used by GBIF) is not optimal for such data. Extensions to Darwin core, such as Humboldt core, have been proposed, but they are not yet full operational. In the new paper we propose a simple database structure based on Darwin core and Humboldt core that can store inventories, and that can be used by researchers with minimal knowledge of databases.

The template comes with a substantial new dataset on Czech birds (348 sites, 524 sampling events, 15,969 species-per-event observations).

We hope that this will be useful!