Biodiversity and ecosystem research is addressing the grand societal challenge to predict the biosphere under global environmental change. It is difficult to predict the complex ways of biosphere change in relation to other planetary – global - changes. Researchers are addressing this grand societal challenge since biodiversity change has huge impacts on the environmental stability of temperature, air composition, the availability of fresh water and food, and wider our human health. The GLOBIS-B project studied how biodiversity research infrastructures can work together globally to provide services for data provision and data processing for the researchers on biodiversity change. Specific problems are the scattered – often not interoperable - data over many repositories, and the many gaps in especially time series data. In addition, a problem is that scientists have different opinions on how to express change at the various dimensions of biodiversity (as for example genes, species, communities). The GEO Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) has proposed in cooperation with the scientific community a minimal set of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), but this needs operationalization and testing for wider use. To serve these challenges, the GLOBIS-B project also addressed the required capabilities to process massive datasets in computational workflows based on data and web services from different research infrastructures. The project promoted a global cooperation of world-class research infrastructures with a focus on targeted services to support frontier research that deals with predicting the biosphere and measuring the indicators of biodiversity change. More specifically the project objectives were:
• facilitate the multi-lateral cooperation of global research infrastructures to support frontier research on Predicting the Biosphere with a focus on Essential Biodiversity Variables(EBV).
• specify requirements for extracting, handling and analysing the required biodiversity data for EBV classes from diverse sources.
• develop an integrated research agenda with these requirements allowing research infrastructures to enhance existing capabilities or develop new ones.
• agree on realistic solutions for to address the research agenda, so that the research infrastructures can offer targeted services to calculate the selected EBVs.
• draw up best practices for infrastructure support on the biodiversity grand challenges.
• address the legal implications on licensing, intellectual property rights (IPR), and sharing of resources.
• communicate and disseminate outcomes to policy stakeholders and other interest groups.
Another key issue is how realistic and pragmatic solutions may streamline the legal bottlenecks for the reciprocal use of data and software tools from different origins. Solutions should be workable for both the scientific communities and the cooperating research infrastructures, especially in regard to achieving direct machine-machine interactions. Through a final fifth workshop, the interaction with national, supra-national and global policy bodies contributed to potential refinements of general policies supporting legal interoperability.
