Strengthening global collaboration on biodiversity data: Highlights from the Living Data Conference 2025
From 21 to 24 October, BMD participated in the Living Data Conference in Bogotá, Colombia, contributing to five sessions that advanced open, FAIR, and connected biodiversity data. The event was unprecedented in its scale and ambition to foster a transcontinental dialogue on the past, present, and future of research into the biosphere.
Exhibition
BMD was prominently featured at Pensoft Publishers’ booth, where visitors learned more about the project and its activities. Promotional materials were on display, and the booth welcomed visits from BMD’s coordinator Niels Raes, the LifeWatch ERIC team, Tim Robertson (GBIF) – a member of BMD’s External Expert Advisory Board, and numerous other presenters and participants from related initiatives.
Visitors and partners at the booth
Highlights from sessions
On 22 October, the session “Data model for global implementation of open Digital Specimen & the status of specimen digitization” introduced the open Digital Specimen (openDS) framework and its alignment with FAIR principles. BMD partners Sharif Islam (Naturalis Biodiversity Center) and Mathias Dillen (Meise Botanic Garden) showcased how standardised data models, controlled vocabularies, and MIDS specifications enable interoperable, scalable, and semantically consistent management of digital specimen data across global biodiversity and earth science infrastructures.
Robert Waterhouse (SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) presented on mining arthropod organismal and ecological traits from literature using machine learning as part of the session “Disentis Roadmap: A Decadal Roadmap for Liberating Global Biodiversity Knowledge from Literature”, which was focused on strategies for unlocking biodiversity knowledge from literature through connected knowledge bases and automated semantic workflows.
The symposium “Long Live Biodiversity Data: Knowledge Transfer and Continuity Across Research Projects,” co-organised with LifeWatch ERIC, Pensoft Publishers, and Naturalis Biodiversity Center, was held in two parts on 22 and 23 October. BMD coordinator Niels Raes (Naturalis Biodiversity Center) and Christos Arvanitidis (LifeWatch ERIC) presented the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, highlighting its role in connecting research infrastructures and ensuring data continuity. Following their talk, Sharif Islam introduced the BMD data space, a modular framework supporting federated access, semantic interoperability, and community-driven governance.
BMD’s coordinator Niels Raes is presenting as part of the session
On 23 October, the session “Challenges and Solutions for High-Throughput Biodiversity Monitoring,” co-organised by Niels Raes, highlighted innovations in biodiversity monitoring using camera traps, audio devices, eDNA, drones, and AI species identification, with discussions on data management, standardisation, ethical considerations, and sequence data applications.
Additionally, BMD was highlighted by Kessy Abarenkov (University of Tartu) during the B-Cubed project workshop, “The Essential Biodiversity Variables Cube: A Standard for Spatiotemporal Biodiversity Data.”
The event provided an opportunity for collaboration and knowledge sharing, bringing together members of our biodiversity networks alongside hundreds of scientists, researchers, and practitioners from around the world to advance understanding and conservation of the living world.