April 2023

On April 18, the "GBIF conference 2023" of the National Biodiversity Information Node sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCNM) and managed by the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) took place in the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. GBIF (Global Biodiversity International Facility) is an open data scientific infrastructure which aims to make available information on biodiversity to generate new knowledge and respond to the needs of politicians, managers, educators or scientists. GBIF's international website, include biodiversity data from different sources (80,000 data sets and more than 2,000 million records) standardized and interoperable between them and between other types of data.

Several public research entities, managers of environmental consultancies and professors from the univeristy have participated in these conferences. The main objective of the meeting has been to maintain communication between GBIF Spain, the data publishers and the collaborating entities. The ICTS-RBD of the Doñana Biological Station was there represented by its technical staff from the metadata and collections team.

Part of the conference was focused in giving an overview of the origin, operation and current status of the GBIF International and GBIF Spain websites, their differences, the new structures developed and the context of its position at a european and national level. The GBIF Spain website publishes data on the presence/absence of species, list of species and biodiversity sampling events. This portal currently includes 39,912,343 records, 432 data sets of 187,292 species and has 117 collaborating institutions.

The ICTS-RBD has published in recent years several data sets supported by the GBIF Spain National Node following the guidelines for the process of standardization and publication of data on the international portal. The data is part of the "Monitoring Program for Natural Resources and Processes in the Doñana Natural Area" of the ICTS-RBD. On the other hand, the Scientific Collections of the EBD-CSIC share a total of 34,121 records of their historical collection of vertebrates. Now, integrated as part of the ICTS-RBD, one of its priorities is to continue adding specimens and incorporating data sets from more recent collections such as plants and invertebrates.

We appreciate the opportunity to have been participate in this conference which reinforce the collborative work between GBIF Spain and the ICTS-RBD.