Darwin Core: An Evolving Community-Developed Biodiversity Data Standard

By John Wieczorek, David Bloom, Robert P. Guralnick, Stanley D. Blum, Markus Döring, Renato De Giovanni, Tim Robertson, D. Vieglais. PLoS ONE, 2012

1,123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biodiversity data derive from myriad sources stored in various formats on many distinct hardware and software platforms. An essential step towards understanding global patterns of biodiversity is to provide a standardized view of these heterogeneous data sources to improve interoperability. Fundamental to this advance are definitions of common terms. This paper describes the evolution and development of Darwin Core, a data standard for publishing and integrating biodiversity information. We focus on the categories of terms that define the standard, differences between simple and relational Darwin Core, how the standard has been implemented, and the community processes that are essential for maintenance and growth of the standard. We present case-study extensions of the Darwin Core into new research communities, including metagenomics and genetic resources. We close by showing how Darwin Core records are integrated to create new knowledge products documenting species distributions and changes due to environmental perturbations.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/544aff5a6bcb7f838c3b598eaf979100db3557c3

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Citations in the corpus

GIFT – A Global Inventory of Floras and Traits for macroecology and biogeography (2019, methodology): “5 from GIFT and their meta-data as Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al., 2012; Wieczorek et al., 2014) and Humboldt Core (Guralnick et al.”
Big data for forecasting the impacts of global change on plant communities (2017, methodology): “Participants use the same data standards (Wieczorek et al. , 2012), and therefore searches yield results in a common format.”
Finding needles in haystacks: linking scientific names, reference specimens and molecular data for Fungi (2014, methodology): “Darwin Core is a data standard for publishing and integrating biodiversity information (15).”
Towards a U.S. national program for monitoring native bees (2020, background): “Existing national resources can offer guidance; the Darwin Core data standards (Wieczorek et al., 2012) and the United States Geological Survey’s Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON – htt”
Where do functional traits come from? The role of theory and models (2019, background): “Much discussion and planning has followed for better coordination, integration and accessibility of such data (Gallagher et al., 2020; Guralnick et al., 2018; Wieczorek et al., 2012).”
Open Nomenclature in the biodiversity era (2016, background): “…biodiversity data include the ABCD Schema (http://bgbm3.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/TDWG/CODATA/ default.htm; Holetschek et al. 2012) and the Darwin Core (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/; Wieczorek et al. 2012), both ratified and maintained by the international organization Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG).”
Brazilian Flora 2020: Innovation and collaboration to meet Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) (2018, background): “org/dwca-assistant/>) that can be easily exported and integrated into other systems (Wieczorek et al. 2012).”
A standard protocol for reporting species distribution models (2020, background): “Similarly, shared data standards like the Darwin Core Standard (DwC; Wieczorek et al. 2012) and metadata standards like the Ecological Metadata Language (EML; based on Michener et al. 1997) have proved essential to compiling primary biodiversity data records in repositories such as GBIF ( <…”