Format: ORAL

Shelley A. James1, 2,Elycia Wallis3, 2, Visotheary Ung4, 2, Stan Blum2, David Bloom2

1 Western Australian Herbarium, Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, Kensington, Australia 2 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), USA 3 Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO, Melbourne, Australia 4 Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France

Data standards are crucial for the efficient and effective sharing of biodiversity data for herbarium management, conservation, policy development and botanical research. They enable data to follow FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics) data principles. Data standards are essential for data infrastructure projects such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG - https://www.tdwg.org/) is a not-for-profit, scientific and educational association that enables international collaboration among creators, managers and users of biodiversity information and promotes effective dissemination and sharing of knowledge about the worlds biota. In collaboration with partner organizations, TDWG develops, maps and maintains standards, extensions and guidelines for documenting and exchanging data about geo- and bio-diversity, to guarantee data interoperability between communities. The most widely used of these is Darwin Core, which facilitates the sharing of information about the occurrence of taxa in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and other related information. Also relevant to the botanical community are: Audiovisual Core - a set of vocabularies to represent metadata for biodiversity multimedia resources; Taxon Concept Schema – taxon concepts as defined in published taxonomic classifications, revisions and databases; the Humboldt Extension - an extension to Darwin Core for representing information about scope, method and completeness of observational inventories; and the MIxS (Minimum Information about any (x) Sequence) extension to Darwin Core to integrate genomic data. Information technology and scientific methods are not static, and data standards must be developed and maintained to keep pace with needs and expectations.  Early TDWG standards relevant to botany have been reframed and absorbed into current standards. In addition, TDWG establishes new community-led interest groups to develop standards and vocabularies that cover new areas, such as People in Biodiversity Data, Collection Descriptions, and Plant Phenology.