From November 4 to 5, the Fourth National Symposium on Biodiversity Informatics was held in Nanning, Guangxi Province. It was organized by the Bureau of Sciences & Technology for Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Department of Nature and Ecology Conservation for Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People’s Republic of China, Biodiversity Committee, CAS, and Chinese National Committee for CODATA. 103 participants from 47 organizations attended the symposium, including internationally organizations, universities, research institutes, natural reserves, herbarium, museums, and also Academia Sinica from Chinese Taiwan.

On the morning of November 4, Prof. Keping Ma chaired the opening ceremony and Mr. Yue Peng, Deputy Administrator of Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine of Guangxi, gave an opening address. In the symposium, the organizer not only invited the academic experts, but also invited the famous people "outside" the field and those with good reputation in the world.

The symposium was started with a plenary presentation from Prof. Jianhui Li, Director of Scientific Data Center for Computer Network Information Center, CAS. He detailed the current development of data publishing online, data open and citation, introduced some exploratory work, such as data citation of online journals such as China Scientific Data, opening long-term observation data and promoting data sharing. Based on the concept that “Value is recognized by the user”, the steps of opening online data was greatly promoted. 

Dr. Robert Corrigan, the director operations of Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), delivered a speech on “EOL TraitBank: An open digital repository for organism traits”. Unlike the farmers went to the fields to harvest fruits, he pointed that it was not easy to use the scientific datasets as you wanted. The growth of scientific data was fast while the research paper and datasets grew relatively slow. He introduced the TraitBank, which was built on collecting data from published papers. It sorts the data type according to the measurements, statistics and facts. Currently, there was nearly 11 million online data occurrences (http://eol.org/statistics/data). 

Dr. Yong Rui, the Executive Vice-President of Microsoft Research Asia, introduced the Intelligent Visual Identification System. He vividly showed the research progress that Microsoft had achieved in computer vision. For example, the How-old.net APP was designed base on Microsoft Oxford Project; In-depth learning combining with big data recognition could identify objects and reduce error rate. Regarding to the theme of the symposium, he suggested that there were three issues to make a successful progress of biodiversity informatics - big data, professional knowledge in biology and algorithm like computer deep learning. He expressed the hope to have a further cooperation with Institute of Botany, especially in plants and animals recognition. 

In the presentation “Organising Global Biodiversity Data–Challenges and Opportunities”, Dr. Donald Hobern, the GBIF Executive Secretary, pointed that it would be helpful for the governments to make policies and biodiversity conservation with a good understanding and usage of data. A good model needed the support of high quality data. To integrate and share data globally were what that GBIF had done. The recent key work was improving data quality and filling data gap, thus to promote the integration and examination of a completed species checklist, and give priority to empower global sharing knowledge database with the relevant institutions. Meanwhile, GBIF held symposiums, training workshops and provided practical tools to encourage and help more and more countries or research institutes to collect data, sort data and use data.

Prof. Keping Ma gave a plenary presentation on “Biodiversity Informatics and Related Developments”. He introduced the background, main content of biodiversity informatics and gave a comprehensive introduction of global and national important projects in this field, especially detailed some projects in China, for example, Species Catalogue of China (print version), National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII), Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and Asia Biodiversity Conservation and Database Network (ABCDNet).

In the symposium, 48 presentations of the 6 sessions, presented the progress of species catalogue and the compiling & digitization of flora, specimen digitization and data sharing, digital botanical garden & digital herbarium of nature reserves, development and maintenance of biodiversity websites, citizen sciences & public information dissemination, biodiversity online resources display. Among these, the citizen sciences & public information dissemination session and development and maintenance of biodiversity websites session were first organized according to the suggestions proposed by participants in the last symposium. It meant to improve citizen science and encourage more people to get involved in. All the presentations were very popular. Participants, especially the graduate students actively expressed their opinions and asked questions in English, left a deep impression to people.

On November 5, Mr. Li Li, Deputy Secretary of Guangxi Medicinal Botanical Garden, presided over the closing ceremony.

Prof. Keping Ma made a conclusion of the symposium. Recently, biodiversity informatics developed fast in China. The symposium well displayed the progress. With the cooperation of related internationally projects, there would be a win-win situation for us. In the future, we would promote the development of biodiversity informatics in different ways, like holding training workshop on data mining, website construction, species checklist compiling. Through the Internet, we could introduce our achievements and progress abroad. Also, more efforts would be made to promote public understanding of science and public participation in science.

The symposium was a great opportunity for participants to exchange ideas and share progress. The advanced experience and academic ideas were learned, our progress were also introduced to international colleagues, making a good development of biodiversity informatics.