Wikidata - Biodiversity:

 Wikidata - Biodiversity:

In the world of conservation and biology, Wikidata acts as a "central nervous system" for biodiversity data. It connects disparate databases—from museum collections and DNA sequences to historical field notes—into a single, machine-readable knowledge graph.

​1. The Global Identifier Hub

​Biodiversity data is notoriously fragmented across different institutions. Wikidata solves this by acting as a Linked Open Data (LOD) hub. It maps internal IDs from various sources to a single Wikidata "item" (Q-ID).

  • ​Taxonomic Aggregation: It links identifiers from major authorities like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), and IUCN Red List.
  • ​Property Mapping: For any given species, Wikidata uses specific properties like P105 (taxon rank), P225 (taxon name), and P141 (IUCN conservation status).

​2. Major Biodiversity Initiatives

​Several large-scale projects use Wikidata to "clean" and connect their data:

  • ​WikiProject BHL: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) uses Wikidata to disambiguate thousands of historical authors and collectors. This allows researchers to link a 19th-century botanical specimen to the specific person who collected it and the book where it was first described.

  • ​WikiProject Taxonomy: This community-driven project works to ensure that every recognized species on Earth has a structured entry, reflecting current scientific consensus while also tracking "synonyms" (alternative names for the same species).

  • ​Bionomia: A tool that uses Wikidata to link natural history museum specimens to the people who collected or identified them, giving "credit" to the humans behind the data.

​3. Visualizing Biodiversity

​Because Wikidata is structured, you can use the Wikidata Query Service (SPARQL) to visualize biodiversity in ways traditional databases can't easily do:

  • ​Distribution Maps: Querying coordinates of sightings to create heatmaps of invasive species.
  • ​Timeline of Discovery: Visualizing when certain families of plants were first described over the last 300 years.
  • ​Scholia: A tool that generates "scholarly profiles" for species, showing the network of researchers, publications, and institutions associated with a specific organism.

​Key Properties for Biodiversity

​If you are exploring the technical side, these are the most common "predicates" used:

Property ID Property Name Example Value

P225 Taxon name Panthera leo

P105 Taxon rank Species

P171 Parent taxon Panthera

P141 Conservation status Vulnerable (Q82775)

P846 GBIF ID 5219404


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