Colombian Biodiversity Data Contributions by the Instituto Humboldt

The availability of data and information that have a temporal dimension is essential to guarantee reliability, promote collaboration, and increase efficiency when investing resources¹. Over twenty years of research, the Humboldt Institute has generated a significant amount of data that is currently shared in national platforms such as the Biodiversity Information System of Colombia and global platforms such at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). These efforts were made in response to the necessities of the country and international commitments such as those established in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which highlights the importance of strengthening the free and open access to data.

The data generated by the Humboldt Institute is kept by the Institutional Infrastructure of Data, which was consolidated in 2013 with the goal of facilitating the accomplishment of the Institute’s mission goals, thus ensuring the integration, security, and access to research data in which both national and international associates have collaborated.

Since the establishment of that infrastructure, international standards and quality protocols have been implemented in the data generated by institutional research, represented chiefly by biological (607 species files, 927,949 biological records, 113 species lists, 108,579 camera trapping images, 1 sound landscape and 2 phylogenies) and geographical (satellite images, geographical layers, geographic databases, maps, and web services) data. This collection of data seeks to contribute to the national knowledge in terms of biodiversity.

Consequently, the data generated by the Institute is centralized and structured. It is used as a tool in decision making pertaining threatened, exotic and invasive species and strategic ecosystems (such as tropical dry forests, wetlands, and paramos), among other aspects.

Besides showing the contributions the Institute has made at different scales, this type of analysis also identifies information gaps for taxonomic groups and areas that should be prioritized due their lack of data. In this way, there is acontribution to the planning of future projects.