ViBRANT

The Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy (ViBRANT) is a European Union FP7 funded project (started in December 2010) to support the development of virtual research communities involved in biodiversity science. It is funded under grant agreement n°261532 (FP7/2007-2013). The goal of ViBRANT is to provide a more integrated and effective framework for those managing biodiversity data on the Web. ViBRANT will be funded until December 2013. Specific operational objectives of ViBRANT are:

1. to provide sustainable services in data mobilisation, integration, publication, sharing, use and reuse to research communities, biodiversity and conservation agencies, national and regional authorities and the European public.
2. to connect end users of biodiversity data to networks of primary producers or to the most appropriate research facility.
3. to provide the means for biodiversity researchers to establish and document the state of the art in biodiversity research.
4. to identify research and development needs and gaps in the provision of support to biodiversity researchers.
5. to provide an information centre for biodiversity research results and developments.
6. to defragment access to biodiversity data through data mining biodiversity literature.

See vbrant.eu for further information.

The termination of ViBRANT will not imply the termination of the biowikifarm services. The efforts of ViBRANT are primarily important in creating new services and software, not in the basic maintenance. Both the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM) and the IT Center of the Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB) support the basic services of the biowikifarm independently of the ViBRANT project duration.