SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER Supporting biodiversity studies with the EUBrazilOpenBio Hybrid Data Infrastructure

SUMMARY EUBrazilOpenBio is a collaborative initiative addressing strategic barriers in biodiversity research by integrating open access data and user-friendly tools widely available in Brazil and Europe. The project deploys the EU-Brazil Hybrid Data Infrastructure that allows the sharing of hardware, software and data on-demand. This infrastructure provides access to several integrated services and resources to seamlessly aggregate taxonomic, biodiversity and climate data, used by processing services implementing checklist cross-mapping and ecological niche modelling. A Virtual Research Environment was created to provide users with a single entry point to processing and data resources. This article describes the architecture, demonstration use cases and some experimental results and validation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.