ASU gained a registration in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) confirmed an application for registration of Altai State University. The page of Altai State University on the site GBIF is available from this link.

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a free and open Internet project for the study of biodiversity. In terms of organization GBIF is an international institution that focuses on the generation of global scientific data on biodiversity that are accessible via the Internet through web services.

GBIF is a research infrastructure for open data funded by the world’s governments and aimed at giving anyone access to data on all the life forms on Earth. The central secretariat of the organization is located in Copenhagen (Denmark). The secretariat provides the world's institutions (scientific, educational, etc.) with general documents and open source tools that allow them to share information about living objects: where and when it was observed or where and when it was collected. At the same time, information is obtained from many sources: from museum exhibitions collected in the XVIII and XIX centuries to photos from smartphones that are used by amateur naturalists in recent times.

Information is provided by different institutions around the world, and GBIF makes this data searchable through a "single window". The data available through the GBIF portal are primarily constituted by information on the distribution of plants, animals, fungi and microbes around the world.

GBIF seeks to integrate digital resources on the entire spectrum of life organization, from genes to ecosystems, and link them to issues important to science and society through GIS tools. GBIF works in partnership with other international organizations, such as Catalogue of Life (catalogueoflife.org), Biodiversity Information Standards (tdwg.org), Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL), the Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org) and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

"Undoubtedly, data on the distribution of plants and animals, which are stored in the South Siberian Botanical Garden, at the Faculty of Biology, or in private collections and depositories of scientists and graduates of Altai State University, are interesting for GBIF. When you visit their website, the map of the world with red-yellow epicenters of activity immediately attracts your attention. However, these red epicenters are not the points of occurrence of living organisms, but the activity points of institutions engaged in digitizing data on their distribution over a particular territory. As can be seen from the map, the institutions of our country are lagging behind other developed countries! The blue color of the map on the territory of Russia is the same as in the territory of the Sahara desert. This is a problem, and the situation should be changed," Doctor of Biology, Assistant Professor at the Department of Botany, Technical Coordinator of Altai State University page on the GBIF website A.V. Vaganov emphasized.

According to Alexey V. Vaganov, GBIF will be primarily interested in the materials of ASU Herbarium (ALTB is the international acronym for ASU Herbarium) that takes the fourth place in Russia among university herbariums by the number of herbarium sheets. In addition, information accumulated by entomologists, ornithologists and botanists of Altai State University, especially on the territory of Altai, is important.

"Few are aware that the mountain system of Altai and Sayan belongs to the list of 200 key ecoregions of the world. As a consequence, to investigate and preserve the natural wealth of our native land is a direct responsibility of Altai State University biologists. I hope that the work on digitalization of ASU collections in GBIF will change the map on the main screen, and Altai will light up with a red dot, which will be a signal for scientists around the world that there is someone to work with at Altai State University. I believe that the entry of ASU in GBIF is one of the most memorable gifts of the passing year, the Year of Ecology," A.V. Vaganov noted.