Standards that tie sources together

Standards let a camera-trap observation, a GPS fix and a volunteer's sighting be combined and reused. Each entry links to the body that maintains it.

Standard	Maintained by	What it covers	Sources
Darwin Core	TDWG	Vocabulary for occurrence records and sampling events: what, where, when, by whom.	All sources
Camtrap DP	TDWG	Exchange format for camera-trap data: deployments, media and observations.	Camera traps
Audubon Core	TDWG	Vocabulary for describing biodiversity media such as images, video and sound.	Camera traps, acoustics, citizen science
Movebank data model	Movebank (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior)	Data model and attribute dictionary for animal tracking and sensor data. A widely used convention, not a TDWG standard.	GPS tracking
Ecological Metadata Language (EML)	EML community	Metadata standard for describing ecological datasets; used for dataset metadata in GBIF's IPT.	All sources
OGC GeoTIFF	Open Geospatial Consortium	Format for georeferenced raster imagery.	Remote sensing
STAC	STAC community	SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog: describes collections of imagery so they can be searched.	Remote sensing
FAIR principles	GO FAIR	Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable: guiding principles, not a file format.	All sources

Publishing infrastructures: GBIF (biodiversity occurrences, on land and at sea) and OBIS (marine). Data reaches GBIF through an IPT installation.

Example

Inside a Camtrap DP package

File	Contains
`datapackage.json`	Metadata about the package and the project
`deployments.csv`	Camera placements: where, when, and with what settings
`media.csv`	The image and video files recorded during deployments
`observations.csv`	What was seen in those files, by people or by AI