Help

1. What is Cos4Bio?

Cos4Bio is a co-designed, interoperable and open source service that collects biodiversity information from multiple citizen observatories in one place, allowing experts to save time in the species identification process and facilitating access to a large number of observations of biodiversity from a single site.

Cos4Bio is available on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and complies with the FAIR data principles, it is searchable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

2. Who is behind Cos4Bio?

Cos4Bio has been developed by Bineo Consulting SL within the European Horizon 2020 Cos4Cloud project, whose main objective is to improve the technologies of citizen observatories to help them increase the quantity and quality of observations and, finally, help guarantee their viability. long-term.

3. How can I register with Cos4Bio?

The use of the Cos4Bio service does not require user registration since access is made through login in the external service of Authenix. Authenix is part of the European Horizon 2020 Cos4Cloud project, and is available in the European Open Science Cloud EOSC (European Open Science Cloud), you can consult the Privacy Policy of AUthenix and its terms of use for more information.

  

Although Cos4Bio does not require registration, it does give visibility to the contribution made by each expert, allowing them to share their profile with information on the identifications and comments they have made, their searches and downloads.

4. Where are the observations that appear in Cos4Bio from?

In Cos4Bio you can find the biodiversity observations of the citizen observatories integrated in the Cos4Bio service, such as PlantNet or Natusfera, to facilitate access to the information it is possible to apply different search criteria and filters, such as species, observatory, quality, location , date…

5. Which users is Cos4Bio aimed at?

Cos4Bio is aimed at expert users or users with knowledge of biodiversity, who want to collaborate by providing information on the species that citizens have registered in the different observatories. They will be able to comment and identify species, although the final validation will always be done at the citizen observatory following the validation criteria that it has established.

6. What actions can be performed in Cos4Bio?

Cos4Bio is a service that allows experts to consult biodiversity information from multiple citizen observatories from a single place. From Cos4Bio you can:

7. Can Cos4Bio images be downloaded?

No, but the data download includes the URL of the image hosted in its respective Citizen Observatory, in which the Terms and conditions of use of those images are defined. It is possible to search for images that can be downloaded by filtering in Cos4Bio by type of license and selecting those more permissive such as CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, but the download would be done from the Citizen Observatory in which the observation was published.

8. How can I see the detail of an observation?

In the observation page you can see the detail, where the following information appears: image, date of publication in the citizen observatory, how many comments it has, if there is more than one image in the same publication, name of the citizen observatory of which comes the observation and coordinates. At the bottom in the search bar you can indicate the name of the species and in the text box add any comments you want. Finally, the "Send" button appears to save the changes made, these will be automatically updated in the citizen observatory where the observation was published.

  

9. What list of species does Cos4Bio use for identifications and searches?

Cos4Bio uses the species list defined by GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) known as Gbif backbone that contains more than 3 and a half million accepted names of species worldwide, and that allows us to unify the list of species from the different observatories.

10. Can I see the species identification both in Cos4Bio and in the citizen observatory where the information was published?

When an observation has been identified in Cos4Bio, this information is updated in the portal of the citizen observatory where it was published, waiting for its final validation according to the algorithm defined in each observatory (in some cases these validation algorithms require a certain degree experience, but in others several identifications of the same observation are required to definitively validate it). This allows to increase the degree of quality of the observations present in the Citizen Observatories integrated in Cos4Bio.

11. How can I use the Cos4Bio API?

In the following link you will find all the information related to the Cos4Bio API

12. What are the Cos4Bio Terms and Conditions?

In the following link eou will find all the information related.