Processes and Tools for enabling Interoperability between Citizen Science and Expert Biodiversity Data in Agriculture

The emerging OGC APIs aim to support anyone to provide and use geospatial data from a wide variety of domains on the web, and to integrate this data with any other type of information. In the H2020 project “Farmer clusters for Realising Agrobiodiversity Management across Ecosystems” (FRAMEwork), we develop and implement tools and processes that enable interoperability between Citizen Science data and Expert data in Farmer Clusters. A Farmer Cluster is a farmer-led group of farmers, specialising in different cropping and farming systems working together in their locality with the objective to ensure that their efforts are complementary and to work towards shared biodiversity goals. Biodiversity monitoring data is collected in several formats and through different applications in 11 pilot Farmer Clusters spread among 9 countries across Europe. This biodiversity monitoring data is consequently stored and curated in a Data Hub as metadata records and its associated biodiversity datasets. Such metadata is useful and understandable and it enables collaboration between the different stakeholders of the project. The Data Hub, hosted by CREAF, is a GeoNetwork repository which is an open-source catalogue application to manage spatially referenced resources. In case the data is public, it is transformed with tools that are developed and tested in the project. They are based on the OGC STAplus, an extension to the OGC SensorThings data model/API which has been developed and based on requirements from the Citizen Science community. STAplus was initially designed in the COS4Cloud project (Co-designed citizen observatories for the EOS-Cloud) and its use is also foreseen in the CitiObs project (Enhancing Citizen Observatories for healthy, sustainable, resilient and inclusive cities) as a mechanism to interoperate among air quality observatories. The nat2sta tool allows to transform iNaturalist observations into STAplus records, which in turn are uploaded and can be visualised and queried in map visualisations such as the MiraMon Map Browser. The STAplus instance is hosted by Secure Dimensions and it is based in their FROSTplus development available on GitHub. The nat2sta tool has been tested with biodiversity observations collected in one of the pilot Farmer Clusters during a BioBlitz in April 2022 in Born (Luxembourg), as part of the global City Nature Challenge. Data scientists can explore this data and different stakeholder groups can discover and query the data in the MiraMon Map Browser. They can perform analysis and statistics or build time series and observe evolution of biodiversity variables. Further tools, such as the csv2sta which recognises CSV observations and ingests them in a STAplus service instance, are developed to guarantee FAIR data principles and to ensure data interoperability with other formats of biodiversity data collected in the field. One goal is to link these tools and processes with an open access Information Hub to support FRAMEwork networks, sharing activities, information, data and resources across farmers, scientists, policy makers and citizens. The described processes and tools will facilitate sharing and harmonisation of farmer and citizen-based, high-quality information on biodiversity in farming contexts