Collect, search and link specimen or multimedia data from the rich and extensive digital biodiversity collections from Naturalis or from broadly used Nature sites Waarneming.nl, Xeno Canto (specialized in sounds) and the Dutch Species Register.
National Hub for Biodiversity Information
The Netherlands Biodiversity Data Services (NBDS) are part of the National Hub for Biodiversity Information. The services are categorized according to application area:
- Services for collecting, searching, and linking data;
- Services for the citation of data records;
- Services for the publication of datasets.
Bringing data together
The current biodiversity crisis means knowledge about biodiversity and the realization of research into biodiversity is needed more than ever before. The various, largely closed, silos with biodiversity data within the Netherlands no longer fit within the rapidly developing knowledge about biodiversity. A national hub for biodiversity information helps to relieve this bottleneck. Naturalis has developed itself into such a hub through the targeted (further) development of its powerful, sustainable, and extensive digital infrastructure.
This hub for biodiversity information brings together large quantities of valuable biodiversity data about plants, animals, and the Earth and makes it suitable for use.
Collect, search, link, and cite
The services offer application developers in research and the commercial sector numerous possibilities to collect, search, link, and cite valuable data. The publication of datasets on scientific infrastructures is also one of the digital services provided. This allows the hub to easily distribute datasets to European infrastructures such as Europeana, but also to international ones such as GBIF, and iDigBio. The unique identifiers issued by the hub ensure correct referral to the original data records and enable new links with information from other research domains to be made.
The suppliers of the data are Naturalis, Waarneming.nl, Species 2000 en Xeno Canto. They supply large quantities of rich research data about specimens and species supplemented with a special collection of multimedia.
Options
Webservices:
- The Netherlands Biodiversity API (NBA) is the primary gateway to accessing the digitised Natural History collection at Naturalis.
- Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) services provide permanent, unique and therefore citeable identifiers for all our records.
Tools:
- The Bioportal is a web application to conveniently browse, query and search our data
- Client libraries provide programmatic access to the NBA
- The NBA query scratchpad is an online tool for designing and running complex NBA queries
Hub Scheme
Documentation:
- The NBA API endpoint reference site provides detailed information about all NBA services and data models
- The full documentation on all the options
Data that users can obtain via the digital services are stored in a scalable, modern Document store. All code from the NBA and the PURL services has been published under an open source license.
More information
Questions and feedback on NBDS: nba@naturalis.nl
Questions and feeback on National Hub for Biodiversity Information: support@naturalis.nl
You can also download our digibrochure in English or in Dutch.