VAT: Bridging GIS, AI, and FAIR Data for Biodiversity Research

VAT is one of the fundamental services offered by NFDI4Biodiversity. It is a web-based GIS application, powered by Geo Engine, that empowers users to visualize, analyze and transform geospatial vector and raster data without requiring deep GIS knowledge. The VAT provides a curated list of data products from several FAIR data providers such as ARUNA, GFBio or GBIF, which is a solid basis for generating training data for machine learning applications. Specifically, in this use case, the specific leaf area plant trait is selected from the TRY database and combined with land use classification from the Ökosystematlas, weather data from CHELSA and topographic information. The VAT supports this task by handling the spatio-temporal alignment of different raster layers. The weather data are also temporally aggregated annually using VAT.