Wars not only bring misery to people. The war completely destroys cultural values, historical evidences and, of course, scientific knowledge. Dozens of scientists from southern and eastern Ukraine have become refugees. Many of them have lost the scientific heritage of their lives forever. The achievements of many specialists who worked for decades in reserves and national parks and museums have been lost.
Therefore, among other, perhaps more important tasks, it is now necessary to preserve knowledge about nature. Without this knowledge, we will never regain an understanding of what nature was like before the war. By losing this knowledge, we will deprive the meaning of life of dozens of specialists who have dedicated themselves to the study of biodiversity.
Our Group is actively working to publish scientific data on the distribution of plants, animals and fungi in Ukraine through the global biodiversity database GBIF.
Thanks to the GBIF database, you can find information about the exact locations of finds of different species, authors of finds or sources where they were published.
To date, 1,690,663 records on the findings of plant, animal and fungal species in Ukraine have been collected and published, of which 1,000,888 records have been uploaded by Ukrainian scientific organizations. It was overcoming the “million” mark that inspired us to write this news. Almost half of all records relate to territories currently under occupation or liberated after the end of hostilities in northern Ukraine.
We invite all biologists to cooperate in saving data on biodiversity of Ukraine and look forward to the rapid liberation of our country from the occupiers!
P.S .: the number of data on the discovery of GBIF species in Ukraine from Ukrainian publishing organizations exceeded one million after we downloaded the Polchaninova data about the findings of spiders in Dvorichansky National Nature Park.
