Leibniz-Institut zur Analyse des Biodiversitätswandels (Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change)

LIB Logo Claim

The LIB - Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change is an amalgamation of the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig (ZFMK), Bonn, and the Centre of Natural History of the University of Hamburg. It is dedicated to research into biological diversity and how it changes, the findings from which have illuminating relevance for society as a whole.

The LIB comprises more than 16 million collection objects, primarily from the field of zoology, but also from geology-palaeontology and mineralogy. Using state-of-the-art technologies, researchers study the changes in biodiversity based on this valuable, historical object database in order to answer relevant questions of our society for the future.  As an integrated research museum, the LIB promotes innovative research. Documentation, indexing and the expansion of the collections are important goals of this research infrastructure.

The results of research and the collections are made accessible to the public with permanent and temporary exhibitions and using other methods for public education.

Service Description

GFBio Data Center

The Biodiversity Informatics section at LIB administrates and manages the Biodiversity Data Center together with the LIB IT Section.
The section provides dataflows (e.g. Publication of Type 1 Data), tools and services for LIB's research collections with a worldwide coverage.

One of the collections is the Biobank that offers a specialized storage facility for the long-term storage of Tissue and DNA samples and is connected to the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (www.ggbn.org).

All data are stored in the collection management framework Diversity Workbench (diversityworkbench.net) including field- and collection data, as well as sequence and trace data from the German Barcode of Life project (www.bolgermany.de).

The Morphological Description and Multimedia Database MorphDBase (www.morphdbase.de/) is developed in the section and housed at LIB and is used for storing, archiving and dissemination of scientific multimedia content.

Data are published using the ABCD standard and the BioCASe Provider Software (biocase.zfmk.de).

Scientific data curation services (incl. taxonomic services)

The taxonomic expertise and interest is that of the LIB.

The LIB is one of the eight natural history research museums of the Leibniz Association. It unites genomic research with modern taxonomic and scientific collection based research.

The collections mirror the taxonomic interest. See Collections at LIB Museum Koenig, Bonn and Collections at LIB Museum der Natur, Hamburg.

Special expertise in various groups of terrestrical animalia exists. It is a precondition to successfully serve the GBIF-D Node Vertebrates.

Located at the LIB is Morph·D·Base - The Morphological Description Database. Morph·D·Base is a database driven online platform for scientists for sharing their data privately and with the public. It allows the long-term storage of various kinds of media (e.g., images. 3d-stacks of images. movies, etc.). Morph·D·Base functions as an archive and publication plattform for media from various research projects (e.g. the German Barcode of Life Project and the Freshwater Identification for Europe, FREDIE) as well as the collections within the LIB.

Data domains

Our first preference is to manage data of the collection domain. Apart from this we are specialised to manage, store and archive observation/ monitoring data.

IT services

Data submission and accession

  • Mapping services for DiversityCollection Import

Data integration and management

  • Diversity Workbench Metadata data bases and repositories; remote data management by researchers possible, see: Diversity Workbench Client Software.
  • Morph·D·Base multimedia data repository.

Data backup and archiving

  • All workflows established include backup and archiving.

Data publication

User services