The Disentis Roadmap 2024: Background

Problem statement

Access to knowledge about Earth's biodiversity is more important than ever, given the major environmental and societal challenges we face. Yet basic knowledge about biodiversity remains far too disconnected, and hard to find. This represents a key roadblock to scientific progress, and ultimately to informed policy and decisions. The published research and underlying observations of scientists worldwide - ranging from species descriptions and traits to distributions, interactions and insights on drivers of change - are too often locked in inaccessible literature and electronic resources. Opening up what is known about biodiversity through a network of connected, curated, and digitally accessible knowledge bases is therefore a fundamental challenge, and an exciting opportunity, for the global research and policy communities.

Background/Context

The importance of digitally accessible knowledge has been recognized in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) agreed by over 190 governments through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD): among the framework’s 23 action targets for 2030 is ensuring that the best available data, information, and knowledge are accessible to decision makers, practitioners, and the public (Target 21). A knowledge management strategy to support the GBF was endorsed at the CBD’s COP16 meeting in Cali, Colombia in October 2024.

In the European Union (EU) context, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, a component of the European Green Deal, includes a range of actions to improve the collective knowledge base for biodiversity decisions. This includes establishing an EU Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity, and significant investment in biodiversity monitoring and research through both the Horizon Europe programme and the Biodiversa+ initiative.

Beyond Europe, the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Recommendation on Open Science highlights the importance of open research data available in a “timely and user-friendly, human- and machine-readable and actionable format”, in accordance with principles of good data governance and stewardship, notably the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, supported by regular curation and maintenance.” In the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) describes “accessible, well-organized, secure, and efficiently operated data resources” as being critical to the success of modern scientific investigations.

Cross-domain biodiversity datasets are increasingly becoming a necessary prerequisite for several other initiatives focussed on transformative change. These include the One Health agenda, to inform actions on human, animal, and ecosystem health; One Biosecurity, an interdisciplinary approach to the prevention and control of invasive alien species; and One Earth, an integrated framework for ensuring food security through the energy transition, nature conservation, and regenerative agriculture. Another major driver of demand is the AI revolution, for which training datasets of high-quality, well-curated and semantically structured data are required for developing accurate models to support predictions that are reliable, evidence-based and referenced.

Such demands can only be fully met once the wealth of knowledge about the natural world — the legacy of nearly three centuries of biological observations and analyses — is fully linked, open, and accessible. Liberating such knowledge leads us from the 'unknown knowns' of biodiversity (existing but disconnected and machine-inaccessible knowledge) to the 'known unknowns' of life on Earth (yet-to-be-discovered biology). It is therefore essential to the process of narrowing our knowledge gaps, thereby supporting a holistic understanding of nature, and informing actions to conserve and restore it.

Prioritizing action for the next decade

In June 2014, ten fundamental principles for opening up and liberating digital resources on biodiversity were agreed upon through the Bouchout Declaration on open biodiversity knowledge management. This declaration, drawn up at a meeting of biodiversity scientists, leaders, practitioners, and advocates at Meise Botanic Garden, Belgium and named after its iconic castle, has since been signed by 94 institutions and 209 biodiversity experts and practitioners.

As a follow-up, in August 2024, 51 experts from 10 countries and four continents gathered in the 7th century Disentis monastery in Switzerland to review progress and chart an ambitious agenda for action in the coming decade. The Disentis Symposium highlighted that the past decade has seen significant progress towards the vision and objectives of the Bouchout Declaration. FAIR data principles have become a central tenet of the life sciences. Exponentially expanding genomic datasets are in the public domain. Participatory (citizen) science generates ever-greater numbers of shared species observations. Open platforms such as GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) and OBIS (Ocean Biodiversity Information System) have massively expanded the volume and diversity of digitally-accessible data. Images from satellites are making data available for access and use at ever greater resolution.

With regard to biodiversity literature, the Biodiversity Heritage Library makes more than 62 million pages of scientific text, images and metadata from the 15thto the 21st centuries freely available for discovery and use. Other significant infrastructures to emerge since the Bouchout Declaration include the Biodiversity Literature Repository and Biodiversity PMC. Moreover, biodiversity data is now being routinely extracted from literature, encompassing over one million taxonomic treatments - i.e. descriptions of taxa that contain data on their identification, morphology, distribution, ecology, and biology - in a dynamic workflow to enrich globally-available taxonomic information.

Nevertheless, we are still far from the reality of fully open management of biodiversity data, information and knowledge. Far too much biodiversity data is being published in “un-FAIR” formats, or without critical information that enables it to be verified and linked. Accessing data within publications, as well as their linked supplementary materials, is often extremely cumbersome. Many databases are disconnected from each other and from the source literature. The participants of the Disentis Symposium agreed that a coordinated focus on “liberating” and linking data from biodiversity research publications – estimated to encompass more than 500 million total pages – would represent a compelling mission for the next decade. Doing so would constitute a ‘biodiversity libroscope’ capable of unlocking the full potential for scientific literature and its underlying data to support understanding of biodiversity, in the same way that the microscope and telescope previously revolutionized science.