An overview of current ontologies for interdisciplinary ecosystem, biodiversity and agricultural research

Global change negatively impacts ecosystems, biodiversity and agriculture. Intensive research efforts with numerous case studies in these fields generate large amounts of datasets that should be combined and comprehensively analyzed to synthesize new overarching findings. This requires very good research data management practices according to the FAIR data principles. Interdisciplinary projects should carefully use ontologies for semantic annotation to reduce terminology and data integration problems. Before developing new domain or application specific ontologies, suitable existing ontologies for reuse must be identified. This is a challenging task due to the ever-growing and complex landscape of new ontologies as well as various domain-specific ontology portals that should but may not simplify ontology search. Here, we provide an overview of ontology portals and ontologies, in interdisciplinary ecosystem, biodiversity and agricultural research, and discuss open challenges for ontology search and development.