The EU Pollinator Hub: Operationalisation of the EU Bee Partnership Platform for Harmonised Data Collection and Sharing Among Stakeholders on Bees and Pollinators

Abstract

The EU Pollinator Hub is an open-source infrastructure that aims to standardise, collect, process, and visualise bee and pollinator-related data from any relevant source hold by stakeholders. The Hub features an online collective approach to sharing harmonised data pertinent to bee and pollinator health monitoring. It provides an online platform with three basic functionalities, allowing the creation and growth of an online community focused on bee and pollinator health data. First, the Hub allows such a community to standardise terminology or promote existing standards, connecting them with uploaded datasets, thanks to its “Vocabulary”. Second, it helps users comply with Open Data principles, ensuring data uploaded in the Hub is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Finally, the Hub serves as a repository for data peer-reviewing, a pivotal process to verify the data quality, validity, and reusability of datasets made available by researchers, field practitioners, and institutional and industry stakeholders. The framework established by the EU Pollinator Hub allows datasets of varying nature, such as weather, landscape, and epidemiological data, to be analysed and processed together, providing a systems-based approach to improve data interoperability.