In neat handwriting, Bavarian foresters recorded which animals they encountered while patrolling their districts in 1845: wolves, brown bears, otters and lynx. The records were created as part of a Bavaria-wide survey commissioned by the government. In total, nearly 5,500 observations were documented and later transferred to the Bavarian Main State Archives in Munich. Today, these data provide a valuable baseline.
Anyone seeking to conserve or restore biodiversity first needs to understand what ecosystems looked like before industrialisation and landscape change left their mark. Until recently, however, the records existed only in analogue form – making them largely invisible to research and conservation.
An interdisciplinary team from the Bavarian State Archives, the University of Passau, and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) changed this. Together, they digitised the handwritten records, georeferenced the observations, structured the data according to international standards, and mapped historical species names to modern taxonomy. The dataset was then published via GBIF, the world’s most widely used platform for biodiversity data – establishing a model use case that can serve as a blueprint for future mobilisations of historical biodiversity data.
On GBIF, the dataset has attracted considerable interest: it has been downloaded more than 6,500 times since November 2024. It has also been used in seven scientific publications, including a peer-reviewed study in Nature Scientific Data, a master’s thesis comparing historical and present-day species distributions, and a study that reconstructs biodiversity patterns in nineteenth-century Bavaria using digital methods and archival sources.
The Bavarian archival data are just one example of the many mobilisations achieved within NFDI4Biodiversity. Since 2020, more than 1,700 biodiversity datasets have been curated and published as FAIR data. In addition, 80 dynamic datasets from natural history collections, comprising over 1.65 million occurrence records, are now openly available via platforms such as GBIF – providing a robust foundation for new insights into biodiversity change.
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