Edaphobase

Edaphobase is a non-commercial data infrastructure developed and hosted by the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History Görlitz in Germany, combining data from heterogeneous sources on soil animals, their distribution and habitat parameters of their sites of occurrence and making this data available to the public in open access. Edaphobase currently includes data on Nematoda, Collembola, Oribatida, Gamasina, Chilopoda, Diplopoda, Isopoda, Enchytraeidae, and Lumbricidae. Edaphobase lives from the cooperation with numerous soil zoologists who upload their data to the database and thus make them available for overarching analyses and insight. The database currently focusses on Europe-wide soil-biodiversity data, but includes data from around the globe. Edaphobase is strongly geared towards common data re-use and provision of data and online analysis tools. It follows the FAIR principles and can offer DOIs for submitted data sets. The data warehouse is publically available (open access) via a web-based browser portal, the Edaphobase data-query portal. All data (provided it is not anonymized or in an embargo period) can be queried and collated via multiple filters and be downloaded by registered users. Simple queries are possible as well as more sophisticated analyses of different data groups. Specific applications include, e.g., mapping taxa’s distributions, the elucidation of species-specific habitat preferences (niche space), or environmental correlations with population densities. Edaphobase is a data provider to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).