The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories: A Call for Community Curation

Abstract

The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories is an online metadata resource for biodiversity collections, the institutions that contain them, and associated staff members. The registry provides contact and address information, characteristics of the institutions and collections using controlled vocabularies and free-text descripitons, links to related websites, unique identifiers for each institution and collection record, text fields for loan and use policies, and a variety of other descriptors. Each institution record includes an institutionCode that must be unique, and each collection record must have a collectionCode that is unique within that institution. The registry is populated with records imported from the largest similar registries and more can be harmonized and added. Doing so will require community input and curation and would produce a truly comprehensive and unifying information resource.

Codes for Natural History Collections in Ichthyology and Herpetology

“…Codes may change as institutions and collections are subject to various forms of rebranding, takeover, and merger (Schindel et al, 2016;Sharma et al, 2018). Omitted from such scenarios are small-scale transfers between institutions.…”

“…Rebranding is often associated with institutional reorganization and new affiliations, especially when new administrators measure success by renaming levels of administration. Even ''trademark'' codes (Schindel et al, 2016) are vulnerable. In 2011, for example, NHMUK replaced BMNH as the official code for the Natural History Museum in London (ex-British Museum of Natural History).…”

The NCBI BioCollections Database

“…Resources outside of NCBI are constantly reviewed to keep the NCBI BioCollections Database up to date. In the past, we have exchanged data with the Global Registry of Biodiversity, an online metadata resource that provides information on biodiversity collections ( 13 ). Recently, we imported about 300 institution codes from Index Herbariorum ( 6 ) and about 50 culture collections codes from World Federation of Culture Collections.…”

Access to Marine Genetic Resources (MGR): Raising Awareness of Best-Practice Through a New Agreement for Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ)

“…Access to deep-sea collections is currently mainly through contact with museums or biorepositories and larger institutes who conduct regular research cruises, and databases or publications. The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories, GRBio (Schindel et al, 2016), a collation of national and global registers of sample collections, has recently been incorporated into GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (The Global Biodiversity Information Facility [GBIF], 2019). National registers may also exist e.g., NatSCA in the United Kingdom, 5 and specific sample collections are also displayed on institutional databases and in data aggregators including GBIF and OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System) with holding institutions displayed alongside records.…”