OpenBioMaps – Empowering Biodiversity Research Through Collaborative Data Management
About
OpenBioMaps is a community-driven biodiversity data platform enabling researchers, conservationists, and citizen scientists to collect, curate, and share biological observations to support ecosystem protection and scientific research.
Developed through collaboration among key Hungarian research institutions, universities, and nature conservation organisations, OpenBioMaps provides a distributed, standards-based infrastructure for biological datasets. Its mission is to improve the discoverability, interoperability, and accessibility of biodiversity data across Europe and beyond.
The platform supports long-term ecological monitoring, species conservation planning, and environmental impact assessments. By allowing communities to create and manage their own database structures, OpenBioMaps enables flexible workflows without compromising scientific robustness.
Since its inception, OpenBioMaps has grown steadily, hosting multiple specialised datasets and supporting thousands of species occurrence records collected by professional researchers and trained volunteers.
The Challenge
Before working with EGI, OpenBioMaps struggled with limited and uneven computing capacity to host distributed datasets, scaling demands linked to increasing data contributions and analytics workloads, a need for secure, federated authentication to manage access to sensitive species data, and requirements for sustainable hosting beyond project funding cycles.
OpenBioMaps approached EGI to address these challenges through:
- a stable, European academic cloud hosting environment,
- seamless integration with authentication and authorisation infrastructure,
- cost-neutral scaling provided by federated national resource providers,
- alignment with European FAIR data and EOSC principles.
Working with EGI offered a long-term sustainable solution built on community-owned academic infrastructure, rather than commercial cloud providers such as AWS or Google, ensuring scientific independence, data privacy, and compatibility with other European research platforms.
EGI and OpenBioMaps
OpenBioMaps relies on the following EGI services:
- EGI Cloud Compute to host containerised services supporting data ingestion, processing pipelines, and interactive analytical workloads. This enables the platform to scale elastically as community datasets grow.
- EGI Online Storage to store biodiversity records, geolocation files, and associated metadata in distributed storage nodes. Intermediate datasets generated during processing workflows are also stored in this location.
- EGI Check-in to provide secure, federated identity and role-based access management for OpenBioMaps portal users. Researchers, students, and citizen scientists can log in using institutional, social, or community identities.
In practice:
- Biodiversity observations are collected through national and community monitoring efforts, transferred to cloud compute sites within the EGI federation for harmonisation and validation.
- Curated datasets are stored on EGI Online Storage and made discoverable through the OpenBioMaps portal.
- Users can query, visualise, and analyse species occurrence data using built-in tools, spatial filters, and external applications.
- Role attributes, enforced by EGI Check-in, can restrict sensitive species information.
Services Provided by EGI
Login with your own credentials
Run virtual machines on-demand with complete control over computing resources
Store, share and access your files and their metadata on a global scale
OpenBioMaps benefits greatly from EGI’s federated cloud resources, with special thanks to SZTAKI for their dedicated support. The infrastructure allows us to sustainably manage ecological data and support a growing user community without facing commercial cloud costs. EGI plays an essential role in ensuring long-term availability and scientific integrity.
Dr. Ban Miklos, OpenBioMaps Community Representative
Highlights
Cloud Computing
Online Storage
Support Started
