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GBIF is a worldwide partnership of countries and organisations that have agreed to work together toward making 1 billion of the world's biodiversity data records freely and universally available by the end of 2008.
Achieving this goal will require investment in GBIF-related activities at the national level. The Governing Board has called on all its members, as well as other countries and organisations, to make such investments in the interest of addressing global problems.
Examples of Participants that have made internal investments that help this work include the Netherlands and Canada.
In November 2006 the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), an independent corporation created by the Government of Canada to fund research infrastructure, announced a 5-year grant of CAD $20 million to the Canadian University Biodiversity Consortium (CUBC).
Of these funds, $3.5 million will be directed toward the formation of a web-based querying system that will link university collections databases from across Canada and will take advantage of the GBIF information architecture.
The geospatial, temporal, numerical and historical information thus made available can be used by the governments of Canada and the provinces for determining species and ecosystem-level responses to climate change and other environmental disturbances, to biological invasions, and to agricultural and forestry practices.
At the same time, these shared data will contribute to the global effort to make such data available for all countries, thus doubling the payoff for the investment by the CFI and helping GBIF to achieve its goal.
Work will begin in early 2008 on the CUBC bioinformatics network. The 30 collections involved in the project among them have over 13.5 million specimens. Of these, 1.3 million already have digitised label data, which can come online as soon as the CUBC bioinformatics manager can implement GBIF tools in early 2008.
Additional digitisation is a planned task, and the participants anticipate that they will be sharing at least 2.6 million records by the end of the project.
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