Contributors

   The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an inter-governmental organization funded by different countries and aimed to provide free and open online access to global biodiversity data supporting at the same time scientific research, conservation, and sustainable development. GBIF is a network of national nodes with an international Secretariat in Copenhagen. Thanks to GBIF, data providers around the world have available common open-access standards and tools used to share information about the place and time they have found a determined specie. Currently (Aug 2018), GBIF comprises 54 countries, 40 organizations and 1,426 data providers (https://www.gbif.org/the-gbif-network) sharing over 1 billion biodiversity records.

   GBIF Spain (GBIF.ES) is organized as a distributed infrastructure build by nearly 100 entities from all Spanish regions together with the Coordination Unit. Spain currently shares through the GBIF network over 24 million records of biodiversity (Aug, 2018) under a common standard, including quality control procedures and mechanisms for evaluation and data reuse. Spain is one of the most active countries in biodiversity data usage. Spain is globally situated in the 6th position regarding data download requests (6,192) and also in web traffic to GBIF.ORG website (62,176 sessions). The high level of usage of GBIF platform in our territory is an indicator of the importance of the biodiversity research in Spain and the relevance of its management, apart from being a reflection of the grade of implementation of this scientific facility.

The “Ecology of Fish” Research Group (RNM320) of the University of Sevilla (Spain) has a long experience in the goals set in this Project. Throughout 30 years our research group has worked on understanding the complex relationships established around fish in different inland water bodies and from different approach scales (life strategies, population dynamics, structure and diversity of the communities, energy, management, conservation, etc.). From our work on dams, the first developed in Spain (in the late 70's), our group has conducted projects funded by public and private institutions, which were addressed methodological and conceptual challenges, many of them new to the country. The application of novel sampling elements, from fisheries biology and echo integration techniques for assessing fish stocks shaped a fish ecology team high research activity and prolonged scientific production in a few years, became in a national landmark. The work carried out through those years has yielded a huge increase in the knowledge of our continental fish fauna inhabit streams and reservoirs. Now we are getting closer to understanding the operation of the Iberian reservoirs and the ecology of their fish assemblages, needed for management and conservation purpose: the properties of the reservoirs, the processes from colonisation to adaptation of the species in the new ecosystem, how they develop, function, and respond to perturbation

   Jorge M. Lobo of the Department of Biogeography and Global Change, is a research professor of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (www.mncn.csic.es) devoted to the study of biodiversity, biogeography and conservation of Mediterranean insects. At present, interested in the use of species distribution models and the conceptual and methodological implications of the different techniques, predictors and species data, as well as in the delimitation of historical and ecological processes behind the formation macroecological diversity patterns (see www.biogeografia.org)