Agricultural biodiversity has long been ignored by the traditional biodiversity community and the aggregators of their data. The February 2016 GBIF "Final Report of the Task Group on GBIF Data Fitness for Use in Agrobiodiversity," provided recommendations primarily regarding crops and their wild relatives, but did not address wider issues of crop pests (plant diseases and their vectors, arthropods) and management systems that affect the greater biodiversity of those crops. The TDWG16 symposium, "Agricultural Biodiversity Standards & Semantics," highlighted the current status of agrobiodiversity data management and discussed major challenges in this field. This year’s symposium will provide a progress report on addressing challenges such as crop management and experimental protocol standards and infraspecific taxonomic coverage. It will dive deeper into trends in semantics and data mining for agriculture, and in application of standards to biodiversity assessments. We aim to provide specific examples where shared data management standards and practices across both basic and applied biodiversity research communities can lead to improved outcomes for both science and society.
