Login

    News

    Open data for people and purpose: GBIF establishes task group on Indigenous data governance

    Published 7/28/2025

    International experts to offer input and guidance for implementing the CARE Principles within the GBIF network

    <a href=" https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:3f4632871">Illustration</a> from Finnur Magnússon. "Yggdrasill, the mundane tree." Print. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1859. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center
    Illustration from Finnur Magnússon. "Yggdrasill, the mundane tree." Print. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1859. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center

    The GBIF Indigenous data governance task group comprised of a dozen experts—eight members and four alternates—will lend their insights and experience to help the GBIF network establish community norms aimed at protecting Indigenous rights and interests in biodiversity data and knowledge.

    Led by Dr Lydia J. Jennings, a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and Assistant Professor in Environmental Science at Dartmouth College (US), the "IDGov" task group will help guide the GBIF network, its infrastructure and its governance structures toward implementation of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.

    Designed to complement the FAIR Principles, the CARE Principles affirm the rights of Indigenous and local peoples, nations and communities to act as self-determining custodians and users of open data. The four principles—Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics—provide a framework for aligning the actions of GBIF network members toward more equitable biodiversity data and data practices throughout the data lifecycle.

    "Indigenous Peoples have always been knowledge experts, data creators and environmental stewards, but their expertise has been and often remains marginalized or extracted from within scientific, land management and digital data systems. Recognizing Indigenous Peoples' inherent rights, land title and place-based knowledge is essential to advancing effective global biodiversity governance," said Jennings. “It is a privilege to collaborate with GBIF’s nodes to develop recommendations that strengthen practices for scientists to uphold Indigenous communities’ rights and expectations and to see GBIF’s investment to Indigenous data governance."

    "GBIF acknowledges and respects the crucial role that Indigenous Peoples play in biodiversity conservation, restoration and stewardship, and we are eager to learn from task group members and their communities about how best to support Indigenous leadership in biodiversity," said Joe Miller, GBIF executive secretary. "By amplifying Indigenous voices through the GBIF network, we hope to make FAIR data more fair and equitable for all while ensuring that the information we provide respects and empowers Indigenous communities and their own rights and initiatives around biodiversity."

    IDGOV TASK GROUP
    TERMS OF REFERENCE

    The group's initial efforts will focus on:

    1. Assessing and understanding GBIF nodes' familiarity about the CARE Principles
    2. Overseeing a pilot testing the application of Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels to open biodiversity data

    Work on the first task will rely on a survey aimed at GBIF node managers. The survey will leverage similar precedents to explore the knowledge and attitudes of non-Indigenous experts working with biodiversity data around the topic of Indigenous data governance and sovereignty.

    The second involves collaboration with three Indigenous communities—the Pueblo Kichwa de Sarayaku in Ecuador, Te Whakatōhea in New Zealand, and Te Pu Atiti'a in French Polynesia—supported by GBIF national nodes from Ecuador, New Zealand and France alongside Local Contexts, a global initiative that helps Indigenous communities manage cultural authority and intellectual property within heritage collections and data.

    Each of the three partner communities has experience using Local Contexts' Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels, which express conditions for sharing and engaging in future research that align with existing local rules, governance, and protocols on sharing and knowledge and data. The pilot teams will use customized versions of GBIF’s hosted portal service to integrate Local Contexts' Labels with individual species occurrence records, both at community level and at a global scale, enabling comparison and contrast of the results.

    "The datasets in these pilots present a helpful mix of consistency and diversity, coming as they do from a natural history collection, a long-term marine eDNA monitoring project, and born-digital eDNA soil samples," said Jane Anderson, co-founder and strategic advisor of Local Contexts. "The addition of the Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels provides critical provenance metadata that maintains the connection to community interests as the data moves across national and international repositories. Provenance metadata is key to realizing Indigenous data governance."

    These pilots, like the task group, are part of the GBIF Work Programme 2025. Alongside a Brazilian-led collaboration involving GBIF nodes from Colombia and Argentina (and funded in part through the Community Enhancement Support Programme), the pilots may offer a pathway for developing changes needed to make data models, vocabularies, standards and services CARE-compliant and accommodate Indigenous and local knowledge within the Darwin Core standard.

    The task group will begin developing a 2026 work plan at their first in-person meeting in October 2025 at the Living Data/Datos Vivos 2025 in Bogotá. The members and their work will play a highly visible role in the programme, appearing at least five presentations, two symposia and a workshop, as well as a conference keynote by task group chair Lydia Jennings.

    In recognition of the considerable interest in the task group across the GBIF network, members are exploring the potential for establishing an interest group on Indigenous data governance. Envisioned as an open, informal and virtual community, this interest group would provide a channel for engaging individuals who wish to track, respond to and follow up on work initiated by the task group. More information will follow on this propose "IDGov IG"; those eager to learn more can signal their interest via email to the Secretariat's communications team.

    Indigenous data governance task group members

    Alternates

    The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance

    Source: Carroll SR, Garba I, Figueroa-Rodríguez OL et al. (2020) The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal 19: 43. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043

    • Collective benefit: Data ecosystems shall be designed and function in ways that enable Indigenous Peoples to derive benefit from the data.
    • Authority to control: Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in Indigenous data must be recognised and their authority to control such data be empowered. Indigenous data governance enables Indigenous Peoples and governing bodies to determine how Indigenous Peoples, as well as Indigenous lands, territories, resources, knowledges and geographical indicators, are represented and identified within data.
    • Responsibility: Those working with Indigenous data have a responsibility to share how those data are used to support Indigenous Peoples’ self determination and collective benefit. Accountability requires meaningful and openly available evidence of these efforts and the benefits accruing to Indigenous Peoples.
    • Ethics: Indigenous Peoples’ rights and wellbeing should be the primary concern at all stages of the data life cycle and across the data ecosystem.

    GBIF Secretariat task group support