Increasingly revolutionary advancement in informatics stands as a major driver to the way we do research, affecting how scientists interact and how science is addressed. Open access to biodiversity data available to science and society further enhances our power to understand and monitor the earth’s biosphere on a scale that was never before possible. Taxonomists and biodiversity data scientists, who were used to working as individuals, now must engage with larger communities focusing on species complexes and ecosystems in a broader, even global, context. Additionally, societal concerns are becoming more pressing than pure academic research, and offer avenues to political visibility and impact. We are witnessing an enormous and challenging socio-cultural change in our field, which needs to be channelled to provide oversight and concentration of the work of thousands of researchers gathering and analysing data into a harmonized, coherent, comprehensive and well-structured approach.

Such a new landscape shall also count on the alignment and leverage of hundreds of project-based (short-term) initiatives as well as on a multitude of organizations, which need to complement each other on their efforts and goals.

Plenary sessions, symposia and workshops in this track will provide the opportunity to the conference delegates to:

1. Continue ongoing international activities to promote coordinating mechanisms for global bio- and geodiversity research infrastructures;
2. Identify and promote clear value-added chains from data generation to science policy making;
3. Describe clear uses that require the interplay between data infrastructures and science policy makers;
4. Assess impact towards reaching global goals and targets of a no-action approach to further enhancement of digital (data) skills and further infrastructure development and interoperability;
5. Understand how global biodiversity and geodiversity scientific drivers need to be embedded into national and regional environmental, agricultural, health and food and research infrastructure strategies and policies;
6. Identify how specific data-driven tools and metrics (e.g. Essential Biodiversity Variables) and their underpinning communities of practice, data sets and infrastructures, can act as robust and dependable policy making mechanisms.