The Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure is an open-source software e-infrastructure financed by the Swedish Research Council and developed in close collaboration with the Living Atlases community and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The infrastructure will make biodiversity data available, provide powerful analysis and visualization tools, and thereby offer new opportunities for innovative and interdisciplinary research on biodiversity and ecosystems. The core mission of SBDI is to support Open Science and the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles in biodiversity and ecosystems research. The SBDI consortium includes 11 universities and government agencies in Sweden.

Polytraits is a database on biological traits of bristle worms (Polychaeta). The database contains 47 different traits describing the morphological, behavioural, reproductive and larval features as well as the environmental affinities of a taxon. Each trait has several sub-categories, so-called modalities. In total, 252 modalities are covered. The expression of a trait in a taxon is coded in the database by declaring each modality as present or absent. Each assignment of a modality (and its presence/absence value) to a taxon is connected to a literature reference. This assignment is mandatory, no data can be entered without specifying the source of the data; however, to capture undocumented knowledge, the option "Expert's opinion" can be specified. Additionally, most records are accompanied by the quotation of the exact literature passage which has led to the coding of the information. Developed by: The project was initially started as an in-house project of the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. Traits were initially collected for an ecological analysis of polychaetes in Mediterranean lagoons, but since then the database has been continuously expanded to provide data for other analyses as well. Currently, Polytraits is being maintained by the Institute for Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research and is supported by the Greek LifeWatch infrastructure.

The MicroCTvlab is a service which was created in order to present and disseminate micro-CT (micro-computed tomography) datasets through the framework of the LifeWatchGreece project. This service offers virtual galleries and online tools for the 3D manipulation of the micro-CT datasets. The creation and dissemination of these "cyber-specimens" aim to contribute to a massive digitization of biological collections. The Micro-CT is a web application compatible with all major web browsers. So far, 24 micro-CT datasets have been published, representing a selection of biological and biomedical samples scanned with different parameters. On the main page, scans are presented as a preview of images accompanied by the title of the dataset. When any of these micro-CT datasets is selected by the user, the dataset details are displayed in four tabs, featuring: a) an overview page; b) an interactive tool for manipulating the 3D representation; c) a preview video and d) metadata for the dataset. A Micro-CT Rest API is also available for getting and creating new content.

The objective of RAMS is to compile and manage an authoritative taxonomic list of species occurring in the Antarctic marine environment, for establishing a standard reference for marine biodiversity research, conservation and sustainable management. The taxonomic scope of RAMS covers Antarctic species from the three realms of the Southern Ocean: the sea floor (meio-, macro- and megazoobenthos; micro- and macrophytobenthos), the water column (phytoplankton, zooplankton, nekton) and the sea-ice. Developed by: The RAMS website and databases are developed and hosted by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ). The RAMS content is managed by an Editorial Board comprising an Executive Committee and associate Taxonomic Editors. The RAMS Executive Committee plays an advising role in the development of RAMS and proposes Taxonomic Editors. It links with the SCAR-MarBIN International Steering Committee. To allow RAMS to be as exhaustive as possible, the role of the network of Taxonomic Editors is crucial. These Taxonomic Editors are world experts on the taxonomy of their relevant taxa and are in charge of the content and quality control of data for their specific group. Used data resources: A series of preliminary species lists of Antarctic marine invertebrates, mostly for macrobenthic groups, were compiled by Andrew Clarke and Nadine Johnston of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), with funding from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office and British Antarctic Survey. These lists have been or are being checked and updated by taxonomic experts.

Marine biodiversity data are essential to measure and study the ecosystem health of maritime basins. These data are often collected with limited spatial and temporal scope and are scattered over different organizations in small datasets for a specific species group or habitat. Therefore there is a continuous need to assemble these individual datasets, and process them into interoperable biological data products for assessing the environmental state of overall ecosystems and complete sea basins. One of the main objectives of EMODnet Biology is to allow public access and viewing of data, metadata and data products of marine species occurring in European marine waters through the EMODnet Biology Data Portal.

The RvLab is a very useful and powerful tool, both for users who are already familiar with R (and some of its functions) but also for students and/or scientists who are in favour of open source software and would like to dedicate some time to get familiar with its functions, without having to go through the steep command line R learning curve. The RvLab makes use of "R" which is a statistical processing environment widely used by scientists working in many biodiversity related disciplines. It supports an integrated and optimized (in respect to computational speed-up and data manipulation) online R environment. This vLab tackles common problems faced by R users, such as severe computational power deficit. Many of the routines operating under the R environment, such as the calculation of several biodiversity indices and the running of the multivariate analyses, are often of high computational demand and cannot deliver a result when the respective datasets are in the form of large matrices. The RvLab runs on a HPC cluster, using version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20) on a x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit) platform, and offers an intuitive virtual environment interface enabling users to perform analysis of ecological and microbial communities based on optimized vegan functions. The user can benefit from the availability of newly designed functions if the dataset to be analysed requires their implementation. The RvLab is an interactive virtual laboratory; should the user require other types of functions, these can be added in the "laboratory" and become available online in a short time. Login is required.

This vLab comprises of two online coupled models, which are parameterised and initialised for the specific conditions at a few specifically identified areas for which the required datasets exist. In an attempt to make the tool user friendly a graphic user interface (GUI) developed in the course of previous projects will be used. The GUI allows the user to view model results dynamically through any internet browser. Model results will be stored at the HCMR servers and the user will be able to select the area, scenario, and parameter required, which will then be returned as results in the form of plots. All model parameters and options will be available to the user online. The ultimate operation, therefore, of this vLab will be to allow the user to submit a request for the model to run under a different scenario than those already available.

The purpose of MarineRegions is to create a standard, relational list of geographic names, coupled with information and maps of the geographic location of these features. Marine Regions is an integration of the VLIMAR Gazetteer and the VLIZ Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase (MARBOUND). The VLIMAR Gazetteer is a database with geographic, mainly marine names such as seas, sandbanks, seamounts, ridges, bays or even standard sampling stations used in marine research. The geographic cover of the VLIMAR gazetteer is global but initially focused on the Belgian Continental Shelf and the Scheldt Estuary and the Southern Bight of the North Sea. Gradually more regional and global geographic information was added to VLIMAR and combining this information with the Maritime Boundaries database, representing the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the world, led to the creation of marineregions.org.​ In order to preserve the identity of the marine geographic objects from the database, and to name and locate the geographic resources on the web, MarineRegions promotes the Marine Regions Geographic IDentifier, or the MRGID. Developed by: MarineRegions is managed by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ). Funding for the creation of the VLIMAR gazetteer was provided initially through the EU Network of Excellence MarBEF, but also other European initiative such as EMODNet and Lifewatch provide the necessary funding for the maintenance and management of MarineRegions. Used data resources: MarineRegions uses several sources: marine boundaries, ecological classifications, fishing zones, thematic gazetteers, regional gazetteers, global gazetteers and several others. Web services: MarineRegions provides numerous web services which allow the user to have direct access to the geographic data, maps and metadata from a GIS desktop or for online applications. Currently MarineRegions provides the OGC services WMS, WFS and CSW.

IMNGS is a platform that uniformly and systematically screens for, retrieves, processes, and analyses all available prokaryotic 16S rRNA gene amplicon datasets from public repositories and uses them to build sample-specific sequence databases and OTU-based profiles. The retrieved information can be used to address questions of relevance in microbial ecology, for example with respect to the occurrence of specific microorganisms in different ecosystems or to perform targeted diversity studies. IMNGS also offers a complete pipeline for de novo analysis of a user's own raw amplicon sequencing data generated using the Illumina technology. Due to the personalised nature of many functions and the high computational cost related to the performed tasks, only registered users can submit jobs (registration can be done via the IMNGS home page; regsiter there as a Guest to learn more about what it can do). The IMNGS web interface can then be used to: search and select datasets/samples (runs), create and launch jobs, and inspect the outputs of the jobs. Developed by: Ilias Lagkouvardos, Technical university of Munich (TUM) Used data resources: SRA repository amplicon studies, user query 16S sequence, user raw amplicon sequences Used in tools: USEARCH Technology or platform: Django, Python, PostgreSQL

Scratchpads are an online virtual research environment for biodiversity scientists, allowing anyone to share their data and create their own research networks. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered freely to any scientist that completes an online registration form. Sites can focus on specific taxonomic groups, or the biodiversity of a biogeographic region, or indeed any aspect of natural history. Scratchpads are also suitable for societies or for managing and presenting projects. Key features of Scratchpads include: tools to manage biological classifications, bibliography management, media (images, video and audio), rich taxon pages (with structured descriptions, specimen records, and distribution data), and character matrices. Scratchpads support various ways of communicating with site members and visitors such as blogs, forums, newsletters and a commenting system. Translations of the Scratchpads software are available via our localization server and site content can be created in multiple languages. Developed by: The Scratchpads Virtual Research Environment is developed and supported by the Natural History Museum, London. It has received funding from several European Union and UK funded projects including the EU-FP6 EDIT and FP7 ViBRANT projects (http://vbrant.eu/) as well as the NERC-funded eMonocot Project (http://about.e-monocot.org/). Used in tools: As of August 2015 there are almost 700 active research communities using Scratchpads. Examples of major projects using multiple Scratchpad sites include: eMonocot: A project to aggregate information on the taxonomy and distribution of monocot plants. Each major monocot family using a separate community Scratchpad and these data are centrally aggregated through the e-monocot portal. http://about.e-monocot.org/ Encyclopedia of Life (EOL): Scratchpads replace the EOL LifeDesk system which was one of the systems previously used to supply community contributions to Encyclopedia of Life. An example of an EOL contributing site is Antkey, a community resource for the identification of invasive, introduced and commonly intercepted ant species from across the globe. http://eol.org/ AVIS-IBIS: The Avian Information System (AVIS) is an extensive database information system about all birds of the Indian subcontinent in the series of web-based portals under IBIS to contribute plethora of information available on birds to science and conservation. http://avis.indianbiodiversity.org/ Flora of Thailand: The e-Flora of Thailand aims to provide a web-based flora as a decentralized platform where authors manage, share, and publish taxonomic data online. It will eventually bring together taxonomic data of all of Thailand’s 303 plant families, with keys, descriptions, uses, illustrations, maps, and high-quality photographs of the estimated total number of 10,624 species. http://floraofthailand.myspecies.info/ Technology or platform: Scratchpads are built on top of the Open Source CMS, Drupal. Drupal has been extended with over 150 custom modules developed by the Scratchpads development team, and over 100 contributed modules developed by the Drupal community. The majority (>700 of ~750) of the Scratchpads are hosted at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM). The current setup, which has been honed and improved since its initiation in 2007, uses a single load balancing server running Varnish, two application servers running Apache/PHP, two data servers running Percona (MySQL) and Memcache, and one search server running Apache Solr. This setup can be easily extended to increase capacity for more users or more Scratchpads. Sites are managed using Aegir, a Drupal specific tool for creating and managing Drupal websites.