Petra ten Hoopen and UK Polar Data Centre

Global access to accurate biodiversity data is a prerequisite to our progress in understanding biodiversity dynamics in an ecosystem. Despite recent major advancement in sharing data on the world’s species, there are still many challenges. One of them relates to the mechanics of guiding data systematically from its provenance to end users. This is not surprising considering that behind every species occurrence data point in a global biodiversity data portal lies a huge effort. It takes years to orchestrate a successful sampling campaign and requires significant resources to manage samples obtained in often extreme remote conditions and to secure preservation of and access to the acquired data. Here we briefly describe biodiversity data flow from a polar ship to a national data repository and to a global data portal and highlight few crucial points in this process which aims to systematically share information pieces into the mosaic of our polar species biodiversity knowledge.