Kurhinen Juri, Ovaskainen Otso The experience of the international database on taiga ecosystems biological diversity of Northern Europe

Helsinki University, Helsinki, Finland
Forest Research Institute, KRC RAS
juri.kurhinen@helsinki.fi, otso.ovaskainen@helsinki.fi

The International Project – «Linking environmental change to biodiversity change: long-term and large-scale data on European boreal forest diversity» (EBFB) was organized in 2011.
It envisages the creation of an international database of mass counts of mammals (including small ones), birds, invertebrates, recording the dynamics of abundance and diversity of vascular plants and mushrooms, hunting statistics, the dynamics of meteorological factors, the structure of the forest cover and phenology.
The database runs on a specially designed for its principles:
a). Researchers "come" with their materials to the database, the project helps with the transfer of data in an electronic form, and gives out the information on the projects website. At the same time no one can use the data of the researcher(s) or researchers’ organization without their knowledge and consent.
b). Within the framework of a project, groups of workers/researchers form, such as the winter route census of game animals, phenology (and others) in order to compare methods and to unify data. And
c). - Launch a joint analysis and to make the data public.
There’s more than 100 research partners in the project, in more than 70 scientific organizations and protected areas of Russia, Finland, Belarus, Sweden and Uzbekistan.