The team of Lien Reyserhove, Damiano Oldoni and Peter Desmet from INBO, the Flemish Research Institute for Nature and Forest, cooked up Checklist recipe, an automated routine that uses the R programming language to generate species checklist datasets. This recipe solved an ongoing need for the Tracking Invasive Alien Species project (TrIAS), a BELSPO supported project which aims to support evidence-based policies on invasive and alien species (IAS).
As the team’s submission noted, “Standardizing biodiversity data to Darwin Core can be hard.” Their template GitHub repository provides a transparent, open, and repeatable process for mobilizing and publishing thematic species checklists from diverse sources.
Users with a basic knowledge of R can copy—or ‘clone’—the repository, customizing the code to fit their needs while transforming source data files into a standardized Darwin Core checklist. The recipe also supports several essential parts of the data processing workflow, including iterative versioning and data validation, mapping, correction and republication.
“TrIAS is an open science project, so we wanted to make the standardization routine for our checklist data open and reproducible as well,” said Desmet. "The recipe has considerably streamlined our own work to publish seven checklists on alien species for Belgium. We thought it would be useful to provide a well-documented workflow for others who want to publish this type of data.”
The team is now working to reuse the open checklist data they’ve already published to create a reproducible national list of alien species in Belgium as part of the Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species.
For more information, check out the GBIF website, or contact André Heughebaert, our Belgian GBIF node manager.