The General Directorate of the State Archives of Bavaria (GDA) is the specialized authority for archives in the Free State of Bavaria. It is responsible for all basic and cross-sectional tasks for the eight state archives in Bavaria (in Amberg, Augsburg, Bamberg, Coburg, Landshut, Munich, Nuremberg and Würzburg). This also includes the management and coordination of central specialized tasks such as evaluation, acquisition, ordering and indexing of archive material according to uniform principles, preservation, IT, public coat of arms law and historical-political educational work (e.g. exhibitions and publications). Together with the Bavarian Main State Archives, the nine state archives hold collections from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The Bavarian Archives Act obliges Bavarian authorities and other state agencies to hand over their documents and data to the state archives, where they are permanently stored, indexed and, among other things, made accessible again for research. The archived material is very heterogeneous: it ranges from analog documents such as deeds, files, maps and audiovisual media to purely digitally created data from a wide variety of state producers.

The areas of responsibility and projects of the Bavarian State Archives are very diverse. They range from advising users in research and data producers in information management as well as non-governmental archives in technical matters to organising specialist conferences and workshops, training and further education to designing archiving interfaces and preparing archived documents. Recently, a specialist concept for the digital archive and, together with the Bavarian State Commissioner for Data Protection, a working paper on archival retention and deletion regulations under data protection law were developed.

Bavaria's state archives hold data stocks that are relevant to biodiversity research and have received little attention to date. These are to be made accessible to a broader user community in NFDI4Biodiversity. These include digital-born data from the state authorities, such as data on water resources or central surveys of tree and plant populations, or historical records of flora and fauna in the former Bavarian territory.

The possibility of mobilising and archiving this data is to be tested in cooperation with various NFDI4Biodiversity use cases. In the future, the GDA would like to prepare biodiversity data for long-term archiving through cooperation with the State Natural Science Collections of Bavaria (SNSB), for example, which is also an NFDI4Biodiversity partner. Via an ABCD interface, realised with the help of funds from an NFDI4Biodiversity flexfund, the indexing metadata can also be made available to the biodiversity research community via GBIF.

Bringing in long-term archiving expertise and historical biodiversity data

GDA staff is involved in various developments within NFDI4Biodiversity, where they contribute competences in the field of long-term archiving as well as relevant archival material with historical biodiversity data in Task Area three (Sustainable Data, Tools and Services (TA3, 2consolidate). In a Flexfund project together with another NFDI4Biodiversity partner, the Leibniz Institute for Ecological Spatial Development (IÖR), a workflow for the automated extraction of metadata from analog map series was developed and a digitization guide elaborated.

Converting raster dataset to polygon features

Generaldirektion der Staatlichen Archive Bayerns

Pilot project: Archiving the data collection on Powdery Mildew Fungi

Together with the SNSB, the data collection on powdery mildew fungi ("Erysiphales Collection") and the associated database structure were archived via the SIARD standard in a pilot project. The cooperation was presented at the networking meeting Bayern4NFDI on 20 July 2023 in Munich and can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8182882

There are also cooperations with the two Bavarian national park administrations – Bavarian Forest and Berchtesgaden – for archiving data from individual projects (you can find more on the cooperation with the Bavarian Forest National Park – another NFDI4Biodiversity use case – here).

Historische Daten für die Biodiversitätsforschung: Die Erfassung von Artenvorkommen in Bayerischen Forstämtern

In 1845, the Bavarian government carried out a comprehensive survey of the occurrence of 44 selected animal species. To this end, 119 Bavarian forestry offices were provided with standardized recording forms to document the presence or absence of the respective species. These historical documents can be found in the Bavarian Main State Archives and are part of the holdings of the Bavarian State Collection for Zoology (ZSM) (BayHSt, Zoologische Staatssammlung, 208-217).

In collaboration with the Chair of Computational Humanities at the University of Passau and the Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), we have digitized, annotated, geographically referenced and made these valuable sources publicly accessible. In addition to the binary status of species occurrence (present/absent), the original textual responses from the surveys are also published. These often contain additional valuable information, for example on species abundance, population trends, habitats and the relationship between humans and nature. These data offer broad potential for further analysis in biodiversity research.

Publications

Rehbein, M., Escobari, B., Fischer, S. et al. Quantitative and qualitative Data on historical Vertebrate Distributions in Bavaria 1845. Sci Data 12, 525 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04846-8

• Data set on Zenodo
• Project poster on Zenodo

In addition, GDA is represented in other NFDI consortia such as 4Earth, FAIRagro, 4Objects, and 4Memory, as well as in the overarching Common Infrastructures section of the AG Long-term Archiving.

• Presentation of Bavaria's GDA with its use case at the NFDI4Biodiversity All Hands Conference 2022:
  • Poster
    https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643461
  • Poster Flashtalk (starting at 00:00:47)
    https://youtu.be/04ECuMFdvlY

• Schwartz, Anna Lisa, & Schmalzl, Markus. (2023, July 6). Long-Term Archiving of (Biodiversity-Related) Data at the Archives of the Bavarian State. WG4 Workshop: Completing editorial work on the 'Guideline for long-term preservation and archiving of data products from scientific collections facilities' (The EU COST Action CA17106 on 'Mobilising Data, Experts and Policies in Scientific Collections'), Munich. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8121396
  
  
• Poster submitted for the NFDI4Biodiversity All Hands Conference 2024:
  • https://zenodo.org/records/11183498