National Research Data Infrastructure

The National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfra-struktur; NFDI) is an association which has been consigned to systematically and sustainably improve management, long-term storage, accessibility, and usability of research data.

Partners from German universities and research institutions collaborate in 26 different thematic NFDI consortia, covering all scientific disciplines, and are funded by the German federal and state governments to work towards these goals.

The Leibniz Institute DSMZ is member of the NFDI association, as well as partner in two NFDI consortia, NFDI4Biodiversity and NFDI4Microbiota.

The NFDI4Biodiversity consortium currently comprises seven data centers including the DSMZ and close to 50 scientific institutions, museums, natural history societies, state offices, and other institutes as partners. NFDI4BioDiversity collects and offers biodiversity, ecological and environmental data. Through their combined scientific and technical expertise, the partners provide a broad service portfolio for handling data and develop new service offers in close cooperation with users from research and practice.

Within NFDI4Biodiversity, the Leibniz Institute DSMZ serves as the datacenter for microbial diversity data, hosting the key databases BacDive, LPSN and SILVA.

The DSMZ also provides extensive consulting services regarding the management of microbial data, and supports researchers to fulfil their legal obligations arising from the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol (Nagoya Protocol Hub).

 
The NFDI4Microbiota consortium consists of ten co-applicants/partner institutions, including the DSMZ, and over 50 additional participants from the German microbiology research community. The consortium strives to support the microbiology community with access to data, analysis services, data/metadata standards and training, providing guidance and infrastructure for the handling of data from collection to publication.