BON in a Box provides a toolbox for countries and organizations to calculate variables and indicators using local and global data. It is not meant to provide ready-made global results.

The indicators and variables pipelines are contributed by the scientific community. A first set of pipelines come from Humboldt Institute in Colombia and QCBS in Quebec. There are more to come, and any further contributions are welcome.

Pipelines are powered by the Biodiversity Evaluation Engine. They can run with global data, local data, or a mix of both. It can be installed locally, on a server you own, or used with our beta online instances. See the github repository for more details of the setup.

Below are examples indicators or EBVs that have a BON in a Box pipeline.

As a whole, the BON in a Box platform is designed to facilitate the establishment and operation of Biodiversity Observation Networks (BONs). It does so by providing a pipeline engine aiming to enhance the capacity of BONs and countries to report on biodiversity effectively. It runs user-contributed code on a shared infrastructure, the outputs of which can be shared for auditability, reproducibility, and transparency.

BEE is

• an open-source repository of pipelines to transform data into biodiversity indicators and EBVs
• a modeling tool to turn your workflows into automated pipelines, or edit the existing pipelines
• a form to adapt the pipeline to a local context and a results viewer to present them
• community-driven, aiming to create a peer-review process to enhance quality and collaboration.

BEE is designed to be

• modular and expandable, with a specific emphasis on empowering users to bring their pipelines and indicators to the platform
• language agnostic (currently runs R, Python, Julia, although more can be added), allowing users to collaborate on science regardless of their software stack
• user-friendly, with a visual pipeline editor allowing a no-code approach to pipeline design when relying on existing components
• data-source agnostic, accepting a mix of user-provided and globally available data
• fully transparent, allowing all intermediate results, logs, and code to be audited
• portable (can be ran on on personal computers or on the cloud, with capacity to be integrated to high-performance computing resources)

BEE is not

• a data repository
• platform or computer language dependent
• a ready-made solution showing pre-calculated global maps
• domain specific
• closed box
• for profit

We are currently testing access to the Biodiversity Evaluation Engine for GEO BON members through the web, with no software installation needed. To get early online access, please first make sure you have a members account on the GEO BON members portal. Then, contact us at boninabox@geobon.org to activate your access, with a short description of your intended use of the Biodiversity Evaluation Engine. We will then provide you with a link to access the engine online, and instructions on how to use it.

If you wish to contribute your indicator or EBV code, please let us know at web@geobon.org.

The recommended method is to setup an instance of BON in a Box somewhere you can easily play with the script files, using the local or remote setup (see instructions). You can create a branch or fork from the github repository to save your work. Make sure that the code is general, and will work when used with various parameters, such as in different regions around the globe. Once the integration of the new scripts or pipelines are complete, open a pull request to the pipelines repository. The pull request will be peer-reviewed before acceptation.

Watch the following video tutorials for a quick intro, and refer to the user documentation: