Closing the Gaps in Biodiversity Data Management: What Biodiversity Researchers Seek and Computer Science Can Offer

Recent progress in computer science and emerging technologies has contributed to a paradigm shift in the way biodiversity and ecosystem research, is conducted. Access to a plethora of data is enabling scientists to carry out data intensive research. Both, computer and biodiversity science domains can profoundly benefit from these developments. Research in biodiversity sciences is facilitated and expedited by a wide spectrum of innovative tools available for data management, visualization, publishing, discover, analysis, storage, accessing and sharing. New challenging requirements in biodiversity science are leading to interesting research topics in computer science that advance the field of both disciplines. However, we observed during our work in the BExIS2, iDiv, GFBio and AquaDiva projects, which are committed to data management for biodiversity research, that although essential, new tools and technologies from computer science are hesitatingly accepted by the biodiversity community. On the other hand, computer scientists are often unaware of real requirements by biodiversity researchers. Thus, the full potential of the partnership between the two disciplines is not achieved. With our involvement in various activities such as workshops, teaching, trainings or user studies, we seek to close the gap between the two fields. In this contribution, we share our findings about the mainhurdles that hamper the adoption of existing software for data management and identify potential strategies to overcomethese. We also provide a roadmap for reducing the gaps between the researcher’s data management requirements and the tools developed by computer scientists. We are also seeking active participation from biodiversity community and encourage researchers to provide feedback about how well their data management needs are served.