Promoting sustainable data practices and infrastructures in biodiversity science

• Applicant: Dr. Mareike Petersen
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528674292

The biodiversity community faces the challenge to evaluate and improve the sustainability of its data practices and infrastructures to ensure that they are future-proof and resource-efficient. An all-round evaluation of sustainability in biodiversity informatics requires to address, alongside financial viability, also the fair use of natural resources required by infrastructure development and maintenance, and the availability of biodiversity data for all interested stakeholders, irrespective of constraints such as economic resources or location. The project will carry out a thorough analysis of environmental, social, and economic sustainability for data practices and infrastructures in the biodiversity community. The analysis is praxis-oriented and wants to provide guidelines for sustainable data life cycles, identify appropriate data technologies, and define sustainability benchmarks and key performance indicators. These actionable insights are crucial for developing infrastructures for research data that can keep pace with the steady growth of biodiversity information activities without placing an undue financial or environmental burden on future generations. They are also essential to realise the potential biodiversity data have as drivers of sustainable development according to the United Nation 2030 agenda. The project findings will provide clear indications about cost-effective, environmental-friendly, and socially inclusive strategies for infrastructure design and maintenance and make available instruments for monitoring the achievement of sustainability targets. The project will be done in collaboration and consultation with members of the biodiversity science community in Germany and abroad and will consider also the non-scientific stakeholders, such as policy makers and investors, who have an interest in biodiversity data. As the project will be based in a German institution, the sustainability analysis will be carried out with a focus on EU data legislations.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)