In a move to advance national efforts to make biodiversity data openly accessible and sharable across borders, Bulgaria has joined GBIF as a Voting Participant. The Bulgarian Ministry of Environment and Water will represent the country on the GBIF Governing Board and has agreed to establish a local node and appoint a head of delegation.
"Effective biodiversity mitigation and restoration measures depend on the availability of high-quality biodiversity data," said Miroslav Kalugerov, director of National Nature Protection Service Directorate. "Joining GBIF will contribute to the collaborative efforts of the administration and the scientific and conservation communities for the better collection, storage and sharing of digitized species data and will directly benefit Bulgaria's mechanisms for tracking and summarizing changes in biodiversity."
Located in Southeast Europe, Bulgaria has a diverse terrain encompassing 354 km of maritime coastline along the Black Sea, a mountainous interior and a dense river network, including the Danube, which forms the northern border with Romania. Thirty-four per cent of the Bulgarian territory is currently designated as protected under Natura 2000 directives, including 120 protected areas for wild birds and 233 protected areas for natural habitats.
"We are excited to further strengthen collaborations with Bulgarian data publishers and data users through GBIF membership," said Joe Miller, executive secretary, GBIF. "This step marks a growing regional commitment to share biodiversity data openly and collaboratively, and we support expanding that impact through a national GBIF node."
GBIF users can currently explore more than two million species occurrences in Bulgaria shared by 378 publishers in 46 countries. Responsible for more than 825 datasets in GBIF, Sofia-based scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft shares data derived from peer-reviewed articles across several scientific journals, including the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ), making Bulgaria the sixth-largest contributor of datasets accessible through GBIF.
Together with other GBIF nodes and regions, institutions, networks and scientific journals, Bulgaria is able to join the GBIF Hosted Portal Programme. The programme enables participants to leverage the GBIF network's infrastructure to visualize biodiversity data, allowing for significant savings in financial resources that would otherwise be needed to maintain systems locally.
"Access to detailed, quality information on biodiversity is essential for managing biodiversity, ecological processes and natural resources at local, national and global levels," said Rositsa Karamfilova-Blagova, executive director at the Executive Environment Agency (ExEA). "The ExEA is the primary state institution responsible for biodiversity monitoring in Bulgaria, and as a GBIF participant, we will collaborate with all relevant Bulgarian institutions to preserve our rich biodiversity."