Global biotic interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets

Abstract

An intricate network of interactions between organisms and their environment form the ecosystems that sustain life on earth. With a detailed understanding of these interactions, ecologists and biologists can make better informed predictions about the ways different environmental factors will impact ecosystems. Despite the abundance of research data on biotic and abiotic interactions, no comprehensive and easily accessible data collection is available that spans taxonomic, geospatial, and temporal domains. Biotic-interaction datasets are effectively siloed, inhibiting cross-dataset comparisons. In order to pool resources and bring to light individual datasets, specialized research tools are needed to aggregate, normalize, and integrate existing datasets with standard taxonomies, ontologies, vocabularies, and structured data repositories. Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI) provides such tools by way of an open, community-driven infrastructure designed to lower the barrier for researchers to perform ecological systems analysis and modeling. GloBI provides a tool that (a) ingests, normalizes, and aggregates datasets, (b) integrates interoperable data with accepted ontologies (e.g., OBO Relations Ontology, Uberon, and Environment Ontology), vocabularies (e.g., Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard), and taxonomies (e.g., Integrated Taxonomic Information System and National Center for Biotechnology Information Taxonomy Database), (c) makes data accessible through an application programming interface (API) and various data archives (Darwin Core, Turtle, and Neo4j), and (d) houses a data collection of about 700,000 species interactions across about 50,000 taxa, covering over 1100 references from 19 data sources. GloBI has taken an open-source and open-data approach in order to make integrated species-interaction data maximally accessible and to encourage users to provide feedback, contribute data, and improve data access methods. The GloBI collection of datasets is currently used in the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and Gulf of Mexico Species Interactions (GoMexSI).