
Gabriele DroegeFreie Universität Berlin | FUB · Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum
Gabriele Droege
Dipl.-Biol.
About
45
Publications
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Introduction
I am the Technical Manager of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN, www.ggbn.org) and responsible for all aspects of the GGBN Portal as well as the DNA Module (software for biodiversity biobank management).
Furthermore I'm working on my PhD on Corvids and curate the Corvids Literature Database (CLD, www.corvids.de/cld), currently comprising >9000 papers.
More information at my BGBM and ZFMK staff pages.
Publications
Publications (45)
The multitude of legal requirements for working with biodiversity specimens is challenging and time consuming for researchers and biodiversity research institutions, including universities, museums, governmental and private institutions managing natural science collections (e.g., biobanks, preserved and living collections). This challenge significa...
The access to molecular collections worldwide greatly improves the quality of scientific research by making a growing number of data available for investigation. The efforts on digitisation also aim at facilitating the exchange of material between institutions and researchers that must follow regulations in place and respect best practice. The hand...
The access to molecular collections worldwide greatly improves the quality of scientific research by making a growing number of data available for investigation. The efforts on digitization also aim at facilitating the exchange of material between institutions and researchers that must follow regulations in place and respect best practice. The hand...
The Latimer Core (LtC) schema, named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, is a standard designed to support the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass. Individual items within those groups are represented through other emerging...
The utopian vision is of a future where a digital representation of each object in our collections is accessible through the internet and sustainably linked to other digital resources. This is a long term goal however, and in the meantime there is an urgent need to share data about our collections at a higher level with a range of stakeholders (Woo...
Many institutions harbor living collections in the form of living plants, animals, microrganisms or seeds. In the framework of the TDWG collections and specimen descriptions standards, it has become important to align exisiting standards for living collections and specimens or to identify where concepts or controlled vocabularies would be needed in...
Societal Impact Statement
Plant and fungal specimens provide the auditable evidence that a particular organism occurred at a particular place, and at a particular point in time, verifying past occurrence and distribution. They also document the aspects of human exploration and culture. Collectively specimens form a global asset with significant pot...
Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi project provides assessments of our current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. Produced in conjunction with an international scientific symposium, Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi sets an important inte...
European natural history collections are a critical infrastructure for meeting the most important challenge humans face over the next 30 years – creating a sustainable future for ourselves and the natural systems on which we depend – and for answering fundamental scientific questions about ecological, evolutionary, and geological processes. Since 2...
The aim of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN, http://www.ggbn.org) is to foster collaboration among biodiversity biobanks on a global scale in order to further compliance with standards, best practices, and to secure interoperability and exchange of material in accordance with national and international legislation and conventions. Thus,...
For the last 15 years, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) has recognized two competing standards for organism occurrence data, ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data; Holetschek et al. 2012) and DarwinCore (Wieczorek et al. 2012). These two representations emerged from contrasting strategies for mobilizing information about organism occ...
The variety of molecular methods used to analyze biosamples is continuously increasing, as is the need for the standardized deposition, documentation and citation of both the samples as well as the methods applied to them. Global initiatives such as the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC, http://www.insdc.org), Barcode...
The TDWG standard ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data task group 2007) was aimed at harmonizing terminologies used for modelling biological collection information and is used as a comprehensive data format for transferring collection and observation data between software components.
The project ABCD 3.0 (A community platform for the develop...
Genomic science is revolutionizing and accelerating biodiversity research. For collections-based institutions to continue to lead and support biodiversity research, they must adapt to this new reality. Simultaneously, “big data” is accumulating so rapidly that we have unprecedented capacity to plan strategically to use genomics to advance basic and...
GGBN, the Global Genome Biodiversity Network, is a consortium of virtually linked biodiversity biobanks that provide unified open access to their sample data through a web portal (www.ggbn.org), together improve best practices and develop standards. Since its inception in 2011, GGBN has largely been supported by external grants and in-kind support...
Transparency as well as complete and traceable documentation of specimens, samples and associated information are prerequisites to comply with laws and regulations in Provider and User Countries to ensure benefits of utilised genetic resources are shared. Besides legal compliance, these measures should also help to build trust among users, supplier...
Most successful research programs depend on easily accessible and standardized research infrastructures. Until recently, access to tissue or DNA samples with standardized metadata and of a sufficiently high quality, has been a major bottleneck for genomic research. The Global Geonome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) fills this critical gap by offering s...
Background: The GBOL2-Project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, is the second project phase of GBOL, running from 2016–2018. It focuses on the extension of DNA barcode reference libraries to integrate frequent, common, and indicator species; health-relevant and invasive organisms; as well as agricultural pests. The s...
Botanic gardens are an invaluable refuge for plant diversity for conservation, education and research. Worldwide, they manage over 100,000 species, roughly 30% of all plant species diversity, and over 41% of known threatened species; the botanic gardens in Germany house approximately 50,000 different species (Marquardt et al. in press). Scientists...
A simple, permanent and reliable specimen identifier system is needed to take the informatics of collections into a new era of interoperability. A system of identifiers based on HTTP URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers), endorsed by the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), has now been rolled out to 14 member organisations (Güntsch et...
The GGBN Data Standard (https://terms.tdwg.org/wiki/GGBN_Data_Standard) provides a platform based on a documented agreement to promote the efficient sharing and usage of genomic sample material and associated specimen information in a consistent way. It builds upon existing standards commonly used within the community extending them with the capabi...
The GGBN Data Portal (http://www.ggbn.org, Droege et al. 2014) has established standardised data flows for genomic DNA samples, including voucher specimens, tissue samples, DNA samples as well as resulting sequences and publications. Dealing with different types of DNA (aDNA, gDNA, eDNA) is essential and closely related to user-friendly search and...
Genomic samples of non-model organisms are becoming increasingly important in a broad range of studies from developmental biology, biodiversity analyses, to conservation. Genomic sample definition, description, quality, voucher information and metadata all need to be digitized and disseminated across scientific communities. This information needs t...
Background:
Genomic research depends upon access to DNA or tissue collected and preserved according to high-quality standards. At present, the collections in most natural history museums do not sufficiently address these standards, making them often hard or impossible to use for whole-genome sequencing or transcriptomics. In response to these chal...
Corvids (Corvidae) play a major role in ornithological research. Because of their worldwide distribution, diversity and adaptiveness,
they have been studied extensively. The aim of the Corvids Literature Database (CLD, http://www.corvids.de/cld) is to record all publications (citation format) on all extant and extinct Crows, Ravens, Jays and Magpie...
Introduction:
Clinical, biodiversity, and environmental biobanks share many data standards, but there is a lack of harmonization on how data are defined and used among biobank fields. This article reports the outcome of an interactive, multidisciplinary session at a meeting of the European, Middle Eastern, and African Society for Biopreservation a...
With the rapidly growing number of data publishers, the process of harvesting and indexing information to offer advanced search and discovery becomes a critical bottleneck in globally distributed primary biodiversity data infrastructures. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) implemented a Harvesting and Indexing Toolkit (HIT), which...
The BiNHum project is a collective effort of five natural history museums and research collections of the Humboldt-Ring in Germany to collect, centralize and publish collection data in a unified web portal. The portal and the underlying data workflows provide an extensive set of tools to refine and enrich collection data from various sources. It pr...
BiNHum (http://wiki.binhum.net) is a project of five natural history museums and research collections representing the Humboldt-Ring: the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe (SMNK), the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart (SMNS), the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn (ZFMK), the Bavarian Natural History Collections in...
The Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) was formed in 2011 with the principal aim of making high-quality well-documented and vouchered collections that store DNA or tissue samples of biodiversity, discoverable for research through a networked community of biodiversity repositories. This is achieved through the GGBN Data Portal (http://data.gg...
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”
- Confucius, Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, verses 4-7, translated by James Legge
Two workshops (hereafter described as “workshops”) were held in 2012, which brough...
The workshop-hackathon was convened by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) at its secretariat in Copenhagen over 22-24 May 2013 with additional support from several projects (RCN4GSC, EAGER, VertNet, BiSciCol, GGBN, and Micro B3). It assembled a team of experts to address the challenge of adapting the Darwin Core standard for a wide...
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Genomic Standards Consortium convened a joint workshop at the University of Oxford, 27-29 February 2012, with a small group of experts from Europe, USA, China and Japan, to continue the alignment of the Darwin Core with the MIxS and related genomics standards. Several reference mappings were prod...
Within the context of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Biological Collections Access Service (BioCASe) has been set up to foment data provision by natural history content providers. Products include the BioCASe Protocol and the PyWrapper software, a web service allowing to access rich natural history data using complex schem...
The explicit aim of the DNA Bank Network is to close the divide between biological specimen collections and molecular sequence databases. It provides a technically optimized DNA and tissue collection service facility in the interest of all biological research, with access to well-documented DNA-containing samples and voucher specimens as well as to...
During the last decades DNA-based methods have revolutionized almost all areas of biological research. While DNA isolation techniques are continuously being improved, the impact and importance of adequate pre-DNA-isolation treatment are still largely underestimated. In the present review, we present some guidelines on how to organize specimen and t...
ABCDDNA is a theme specific extension for ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data) created to facilitate storage and exchange of data related to DNA collection units, such as DNA extraction specifics, DNA quality parameters, and data characterising products of downstream applications, along with the relation to the analysed voucher specimen. AB...
During the last decades DNA-based methods have revolutionized almost all
areas of biological research. While DNA isolation techniques are continuously
being improved, the impact and importance of adequate pre-DNA-isolation
treatment are still largely underestimated. In the present review, we present
some guidelines on how to organize specimen and t...
A new breeding colony of rooks (Corvus frugilegus) has come into
existence at Berlin Tegel Airport in 2001. During the following years the colony
grew up to 60 – 70 nests. Development, structure, feeding range, flight activity and
breeding progress of the colony have been profoundly explored during the breeding
seasons of 2004 and 2005.
Assembling...