The Digital Botanical Gardens Initiative (DBGI) ambitions to explore innovative solutions for the collection, management and sharing of digital information acquired on living botanical collections. A particular focus is placed on the large scale characterization of the chemodiversity of living plants collections through mass spectrometric approaches. The acquired data is structured, organized and connected with relevant metadata through semantic web technology. The gathered knowledge can then be exploited to inform ecosystem functioning research and orient biodiversity conservation projects. The DBGI initially aims to take advantage of the readily available living collections of Swiss botanical gardens to establish robust and scalable chemo- and biodiversity digitization workflows. The ultimate goal is to apply these approaches in the field and at the global scale in wild ecosystems. In this sense, the DBGI is a pilot for the larger Earth Metabolome Initiative (EMI) see https://www.earthmetabolome.org/

This topical collection will gather and share the reserach outcomes of the DBGI.