The Use-Case-Project of the Arachnological Society is one of the successful examples of the NFDI4Biodiversity. NFDI4Biodiversity is a consortium under the umbrella of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) dedicated to mobilising biodiversity and environmental data for collective use.
What is the potential of NFDI4Biodiversity? This is illustrated by more than 20 Use Cases: projects in which we test how data can be mobilized or visualized, how cross-regional metadata standards can be established or how storage and computing infrastructure can be implemented for the integration and evaluation of currently decentralized data treasures. The use cases are the joint work of the respective use case partner, specialist and technical experts from the consortium and coordinating project staff, the so-called use case managers.
The ARAMOB portal currently offers almost 120,000 data records. These include around 500,000 individuals of 665 different species at 1300 locations. We provide important metadata for these datasets, which users can view on a map, search in species lists or edit after downloading. For initial analyses of the data, we also offer a special tool for data analysis, the ARAapp version 1.12 (Bach et al. 2024).
We continue to collect species-specific, ecologically analyzable study data that was previously inaccessible. In preparation for the Red List of Spiders of Germany, we were able to compile a further 718,000 data sets from arachnologists from 77 multi-year data collections, which we are curating in a harmonized manner in Diversity Workbench and making available to editors in a protected area on ARAMOB. Once the evaluations have been completed, most of this treasure trove of data will be made publicly available via ARAMOB and the Atlas of Arachnids.
A further step towards improving the data basis for ecological evaluations is the offer of data publication (Data Paper) in the journal of Arachnologische Mitteilungen, which was launched at the end of 2023. The framework and background (Bach et al. 2023) as well as an editorial (Raub et al. 2023) on the data papers were published in volume 66 of Arachnologische Mitteilungen at the end of 2023. In addition, a first data publication appeared in the same issue (doi: 10.30963/aramit6601), the data of which are now available via ARAMOB.
Furthermore, we plan to integrate additional arachnologically relevant thesauri and management tools into the Diversity Workbench database and to intensify the import of data by scientists. This will be facilitated by the provision of templates by the Arachnological Society.
