Curating Biodiversity

The Infrastructure Beneath the Names

Biodiversity is not simply recorded: it is structured. And that structure is not passive. It is juridical, institutional, and political.

In dominant scientific systems, biodiversity data is curated through a layered infrastructure: taxonomic authorities, metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, institutional repositories, and legal frameworks for access and reuse. Together, these systems form what Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star call an "infrastructure of classification": an invisible architecture that governs not only what can be known, but also how, by whom, and to what end.

Naming, in this context, is never just about identification. It is an act of inscription into a framework of legibility — a framework designed to stabilize knowledge, enable circulation, and serve institutional ends. The Latin binomial, the geospatial coordinate, the collection number: each of these elements renders the organism into data, aligning it with scientific standards of evidence, retrievability, and interoperability.

This process appears objective but is profoundly selective. It privileges certain forms of knowledge —those that can be captured, standardized, and circulated— while rendering others invisible. In doing so, it produces an epistemic geography that mirrors older colonial patterns of extraction, in which knowledge is taken from the tropics and stored, processed, and made meaningful elsewhere.

Standardization as Dispossession

Scientific classification systems, from Linnaean taxonomy to Darwin Core metadata, operate under a logic of universality. Their strength lies in their promise of global compatibility: the idea that a specimen or observation, once indexed, can be integrated into planetary-scale infrastructures of science, conservation, and policy.

But this standardization comes at a cost. It strips knowledge of its embeddedness. It separates plants and animals from the social, cosmological, and territorial systems in which they are known and acted upon. The result is not just abstraction — it is a form of epistemic dislocation.

This dislocation has political consequences. When organisms are named and classified according to external logics, local meanings are displaced. Use-categories based on seasonality, kinship, danger, or spiritual role are overwritten by morphological descriptors. Narratives of origin or migration are replaced by phylogenetic trees. Local systems of governance —which determine who can name, collect, or transmit knowledge— are ignored in favor of institutional protocols.

This is not simply an issue of "cultural loss." It is a form of dispossession. Classification is not neutral. It redefines what counts as valid knowledge, and by extension, who has the authority to act. To control the categories is to control the archive — and therefore the terms of future recognition, protection, and intervention.

Naming Without Authority

Much of contemporary biodiversity research now seeks to involve local actors through participatory methods: "citizen science," community monitoring, co-designed conservation protocols. These initiatives often aim to democratize data collection, offering tools and platforms for communities to contribute observations, measurements, and local knowledge.

Yet in most cases, the architecture of interpretation remains unchanged. Data flows upward; categories remain fixed. Communities contribute observations, but have no control over how those observations are framed, tagged, or deployed. The technical layer —where meaning is encoded— is reserved for institutions, funders, and taxonomic authorities.

This asymmetry is rarely questioned. Participation is measured by access and inclusion, not by authority. But authority is precisely the issue. Who has the right to define what constitutes data? Who decides what qualifies as a species, a use, a place? Who determines the ontological framework under which knowledge becomes legible, and therefore actionable?

These questions are not peripheral. They are central. Because in the context of conservation funding, legal designation, and ecological management, the ability to name is the ability to govern. And when that ability is retained by external actors, even participatory projects risk reproducing the structures of extractive science.

Metadata as Territorial Claim

Metadata is not merely a descriptive layer. It is a site of power. It determines not only what a dataset contains, but what it means — how it can be searched, who can find it, and what kinds of relations it encodes or forecloses.

In biodiversity archives, metadata shapes everything from intellectual property regimes to conservation policy. It defines whether a species is considered endemic, threatened, invasive, or culturally significant. It structures the conditions under which data can be reused, and by whom.

In this sense, metadata is a territorial instrument. It fixes ecological elements within a conceptual map, often detached from the territories in which they live and the communities that relate to them. The classification of a medicinal plant or ritual animal in a global database may have direct implications for bioprospecting, commercialization, or legal designation, none of which are controlled by the communities of origin.

To challenge this dynamic is not to reject data, but to refuse the assumption that metadata must be singular, universal, and institutionally governed. Communities may define species by their behavior, role, relational ethics, or spiritual status. These are not "cultural additions." They are ontological commitments. They define how knowledge circulates, how it is activated, and under what conditions it remains silent.

The refusal to flatten such systems into standardized metadata is not a failure to comply. It is a defense of epistemic sovereignty.

Curation as Governance

In institutional settings, curation is often treated as a technical task: the organization, annotation, and maintenance of records. But in community contexts, curation is something else. It is the governance of knowledge.

To curate biodiversity is to decide not just what is stored, but how meaning is preserved and transformed over time. It involves establishing the terms under which knowledge is shared, annotated, revised, or restricted. It requires protocols not only for data integrity, but for ethical relation — between people, places, non-human beings, and the memory systems that bind them.

Such curation cannot be outsourced. It is not a service that can be offered by platforms or consultants. It is a sovereign activity: one rooted in territory, language, and responsibility. And it often runs counter to institutional timelines, technological infrastructures, and documentation norms.

This form of curation is rarely legible to funders or aggregators. It does not produce clean datasets or interoperable outputs. But it produces continuity. It sustains systems of knowledge that remain accountable to the land, rather than to the logic of platforms.

The Politics of the Archive

What is ultimately at stake in community-led curation of biodiversity is not data governance, but archival authority.

Archives are not passive repositories. They are active structures of memory and meaning-making. They determine what is preserved, what is forgotten, and what becomes actionable. And like all structures of memory, they are shaped by power.

In the context of tropical biodiversity, the global archive is overwhelmingly external: hosted in northern institutions, written in scientific code, structured by extractive histories. Even when access is open, the architecture is closed.

Challenging this structure requires more than participation. It demands control. Control over the terms of classification. Control over the metadata layer. Control over the institutional relationships that determine how knowledge travels, what it becomes, and whose futures it serves.

Without that control, even the most well-intentioned platforms risk reproducing the very asymmetries they claim to redress.

  This chronicle is echoed in the blog post "To Curate is To Govern," where the same topic is explored from a librarian's point of view.