An approach for managing specimen-sample-taxon-trait data from the 27 projects of the DFG priority program 1991 ‘Taxon-Omics’

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Over the past 10 years, taxonomy has undergone a major shift because of its move towards DNA-based and digitized data, which can readily be shared. This has opened new avenues for collaboration and the ability to answer questions that could not be tackled before. In recognition of this, the German Research Foundation decided to fund 27 individual projects under the umbrella of DFG-SPP 1991 on “Taxon-Omics – new approaches for discovering and naming biodiversity.” Eleven projects focus on animals, eight on plants, five on microorganisms, and three on fungi. We are here submitting an add-on request for a postdoc and a halftime scientific data curator to implement a mechanism by which each of 27 projects could immediately start depositing data linked to specimens, samples, traits, or taxonomies in a working environment compliant to the DFG’s GFBio data infrastructure. Our approach will rely on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and an identifier registry with a graphic user interface (GUI) that will build on existing solutions for managing sample- and taxon-related, taxon-omics and trait data, with the goal of making data freely available on GBIF and GFBio platforms. As a secondary objective, we will encourage PIs to contribute suitable data for testing a high-throughput species delimitation algorithm using machine-learning approaches. This project will strongly contribute to an increased networking among SPP 1991 projects and encourage PIs to start archiving data in a form that will facilitate future multi-purpose reuse.