Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) - Norwegian Node.

Norway joined the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in 2004 and established the Norwegian participant node, GBIF Norway, at the Natural History Museum in 2005. The mission of GBIF Norway is to make information from Norwegian collections and other sources available to the international GBIF network and to coordinate GBIF-related activities in Norway. We actively work on improving the quality of the data sets published in GBIF from Norway. GBIF Norway cooperates closely with Artsdatabanken (Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre). In November 2007, we set up a joint map-based portal which delivers Norwegian species data: Artskart (Species Map Service). GBIF Norway contributes to the teaching at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo with focus on accessing species occurrence data using the GBIF portal and the Norwegian Species Map Service (Artskart) and provide support for the use of species occurrence data in research activities. GBIF Norway has developed a data portal and data validation service for the natural history collections at the University museums in Norway. This tool is now made available for all the Norwegian occurrence data sets published to GBIF. GBIF Norway has together with international partners contributed to the development a citizen science transcription portal allowing anybody from the natural history interested public to contribute with registration of label information from photographs of museum specimens from the Natural History Museum in Oslo. GBIF Norway also provides a platform for implementing persistent and resolvable identifiers for specimens in the Norwegian natural history collections. In total Norwegian data nodes provides (status January 2017) 22.6 million records from 127 databases at more than 35 Norwegian institutions to the GBIF network. The global GBIF portal includes (status January 2017) 703 million records from 30 831 databases at more than 865 data nodes worldwide. We have identified a total of 112 scientific papers with researchers from Norwegian institutions, (of which 19 papers are published in 2016), citing the reuse of GBIF-mediated data

GBIF-Norway shall co-ordinate internal (national) activities with GBIF work programs, and participate in the Norwegian delegation in the GBIF Governing Board which consists of delegates from all countries and organisations that join GBIF. GBIF-Norway will, in close co-operation with the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (Artsdatabanken) and the other university natural history museums, aim at: -make primary biodiversity data from Norwegian natural history museums, research institutions and other sources available to the GBIF network -standardize and perform quality control and enhancements of the handled data -further develop web interfaces for access to Norwegian biodiversity data -further develop the research field of biodiversity predict ion modeling in Norway through own research, making key ecological data available, and by giving yearly workshops. GBIF-Norway will, as national GBIF node, be the Norwegian link to GBIF internationally, and thus be the main channel for the internationa l audience to information on Norwegian biodiversity.