Darwin Core

Darwin Core (DwC) is an international standard developed by TDWG for sharing information about biological diversity, providing a stable and widely adopted vocabulary for describing species occurrences, specimens, and related observations. Its consistent terminology makes biological data interpretable across institutions, disciplines, and software systems without requiring bespoke translation. Darwin Core’s design prioritises interoperability — records formatted to this standard can be ingested directly by global biodiversity aggregators such as GBIF and OBIS, greatly extending the reach and reusability of Antarctic biological datasets. Adopting Darwin Core is one of the most effective steps you can take to ensure your occurrence data can be discovered, validated, and reused by the international research community.

The Nansen Legacy provide a template generator that supports easy compilation of Darwin Core files. Access the template generator here:

Get Started with DwC and the Nansen Legacy DwC Spreadsheet Template Generator