The Antarctic Biodiversity portal (biodiversity.aq) is a gateway to a wide variety of Antarctic biodiversity information and tools. Launched in 2015 as the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) - Marine Biodiversity Information Network (SCAR-MarBIN, scarmarbin.be) and the Register of Antarctic Marine Species (RAMS, marinespecies.org/ rams/), the system has grown in scope from purely marine to include terrestrial information. Biodiversity.aq is a SCAR product, currently supported by Belspo (Belgian Science Policy) as one of the Belgian contributions to the European Lifewatch-European Research Infrastructure Consortium (Lifewatch-ERIC). The goal of Lifewatch is to provide access to: distributed observatories/sensor networks; interoperable databases, existing (data-) networks, using accepted standards; high performance computing (HPC) and grid power, including the use of the state-of-the-art of cloud and big data paradigm technologies; software and tools for visualization, analysis and modeling. |
