In November 2018, the German Science Minister Conference GWK agreed on a 10-year initiative to structure research data services across different scientific domains in Germany. Now, 2,5 years later, the National Research Data Infrastructure NFDI has become operational, with a Directorate established in Karlsruhe and a first cohort of nine domain-oriented consortia started on October 1st, 2020. A second and third round of applications are underway, respectively planned. The final NFDI is expected to unite around 30 thematic consortia, covering all research domains in Germany.

NFDI4BioDiversity is a consortium of 49 partners dedicated to deliver practical tools for researchers and improve data availability for environmental studies/ecology. At the core of NFDI4BioDiversity are data on the biodiversity of animals, plants and microorganisms. NFDI4BioDiversity builds on previous work by the German Federation for Biological Data, which has been funded by the DFG since 2014. As part of this project, the data centres of natural history museums and established data archives such as PANGAEA and ENA were connected to a common portal, workflows for data submission were standardized, and common (meta)data standards as well as tools and services for research data management (FDM) were established. NFDI4BioDiversity extends the range of activities by incorporating use cases from the broader biodiversity community, including government agencies and citizen science.