Funding awarded to four mobilization projects in European Russia

Owing to generous funding from FinBIF—the Finnish national node of GBIF—grants worth €27,000 combined has been awarded to four new projects under the Data mobilization in European Russia programme. The 2019 call issued in November was immensely competitive, prompting a large number of extremely well-qualified proposals. In total, 17 applicants submitted eligible project proposals, requesting combined funding of more than €135,000 to support the mobilization of nearly half a million species occurrences.

The projects selected for funding are:

• Chronicles of Nature of Russian protected areas: Digitization and data mobilization
• Mobilizing moss occurrences from the Komi Science Centre Herbarium
• Mobilization of biodiversity data on soil mesofauna across European Russia biomes
• Supporting the regular georeferencing of European Russia holdings in the Moscow Digital Herbarium

The combined mobilization activities made possible through these funding awards are expected to add ~150,000 new records to GBIF.org, which would represent an increase of more than 15 per cent and bring the total number of records from the region above 1 million occurrences.

As the total funding request greatly exceeded the available funding, several outstanding proposals have not selected, including

• Digitization of herbarium specimens in the collections of the Central Siberian Botanical Garden
• Transforming identifications of invasive cow-parsnip from high-resolution ground panoramic images into a georeferenced species occurrences
• Mobilization of species occurrences from detailed benthic surveys and checklist catalogues of marine and marshy fungi from the White Sea Biological Station

About the programme

Projects funded under a Data mobilization in European Russia grant from FinBIF target institutions, initiatives and networks in Russia. Projects focus on data mobilization activities and may target natural history collections and other sources of freely accessible biodiversity data from European Russia. Other activities supporting data mobilization are also eligible, including training and capacity building activities. Projects address regional challenges identified for GBIF related to filling taxonomic and geographical gaps in freely-accessible data relating to biodiversity in the European Russian region.