Future plans for the Freshwater Biodiversity Data Portal

While the funded BioFresh project has ended (April 2014), a core team has committed resources to actively maintain and develop the portal in order to reach the original objective to establish a sustainable central hub for freshwater biodiversity data and information. These efforts are currently continued under the umbrella of the Freshwater Information Platform.

We still have plenty of ideas for improving the Freshwater Biodiversity Data Portal and even for developing a fully featured geo-portal. However, at this stage much of what can be done still relies on the future funding we will receive to develop these themes. Nevertheless we are committed to work on the following topics:

• Publish datasets received for publication on the portal
• Publish metadata collected in the Freshwater Metadatabase through the Freshwater Metadata Journal
• Continue the processing of datasets mobilised through BioFresh to ensure their publication on the data portal
• Implement download for advanced queries
• Show IUCN redlist expert range maps on the occurrence results pages once these generic web services become available
• Link to freshwater data available in FishBase
• Further link and implement update mechanism for taxonomic data from Catalogue of Life
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Please let us know if you have any suggestions on the data or tools you think we should integrate.