Mobilization of Biodiversity Data from Ukraine to GBIF

The project aimed at mainstreaming data digitization, standardization and publishing in GBIF, with the main goal to make more data on the biodiversity of Ukraine available for science and nature conservation.

With this project The Habitat Foundation assisted numerous Ukrainian researchers and amateur biologists to digitize and share with the world about 400 000 new records on the Ukrainian biodiversity.

The project also helped the localization on iNaturalist website to Ukrainian, and translated the common names of around 6 thousand taxa, now integrated in the iNaturalist software. It was realised in close collaboration with Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group (UNCG), Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology, and V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. The work in Ukraine was coordinated by Mikhail Rusin, Researcher at Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology, Kyiv, Ukraine.

This report presents the work done and the results achieved. Also, the report presents briefly, the process, the lessons learned and the developments the project realisation went through pursuing the achievement of the most needed for the moment outputs, considering their long-term sustainability and widest use – national and international. The overall knock-on effect of the project is the mobilisation of a huge amount of biodiversity data (more than initially thought would have been possible) and mainstreaming of data digitalisation, standardisation, and publication.

We are proud and content with the results of the project.