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Welcome to BCI

Research into biodiversity relies on the use of specimens. These specimens are held in reference collections around the world. BCI is a central index to these collections.

How to benefit from BCI

• Search now for the collections you use in your work.
• If the data about a collection is incorrect then correct it.
• If a collection is missing create a new entry for it.
• Use the GUIDs displayed at the top of each collection page to unambiguously reference collections from your work - read how.
• Use BCI Web Services to integrate BCI with your database and improve the quality of shared data.

How it works

BCI provides a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) for every natural history collection on earth. There are already taxon specific lists that provide acronyms for use in written publications but these lists don't provide unambiguous machine readable IDs - that is where BCI comes in.

• Researchers can use the IDs provided by BCI to unambiguously indicate the location of the voucher specimens they have used in their work.
• Collection Curators can use BCI IDs to track the use of materials from their collections. BCI also helps curators tag individual specimens with their own GUIDs using BCI-SGS.

The data in BCI comes from two sources. Any member of the biodiversity research community can register and contribute to the data held in the index. In addition to this, authoritative data that has been curated by established sources is displayed in a non-editable form alongside the community data.

Thank You

BCI is a collaborative effort. The initial data available in the system comes from four principle sources. Index Herbariorum (IH), itself a collaborative effort supported by The New York Botanical Garden, has provided seed data about herbaria. IH data is presented as authoritative, non-editable data within BCI and will be periodically updated from the official IH database.

Insect and Spider Collections of the World (ISCW) has provided seed data on entomological/arthropod collections and is treated in a similar way to IH.

Biorepositories.org is a Barcode of Life Initiative. BCI reflects the confirmed records from the Biorepositories database as an authoritative source of data. BCI is a superset of the data covered by Biorepositories.org as it aims to include collections of objects that may never be DNA vouchers - illustrations for example. A small team of editors has also been working to integrate and clean the community records prior to launching the system.

Thanks are due to all those people who have made BCI possible through contributing data.

Mission

The Biodiversity Collections Index aims to facilitate the understanding, conservation and utilisation of global biodiversity by creating a single annotated index of all collections of biodiversity materials used in research. BCI intends to do this by collaborating with the organisations and individuals who curate these collections and the information about them.