Fig. 1

Biodiversity virtual laboratory (BioVeL) is a software environment that assists scientists in collecting, organising, and sharing data processing and analysis tasks in biodiversity and ecological research. The main components of the platform are: A the Biodiversity Catalogue (a library with well-annotated data and analysis services); B the environment, such as RStudio for creating R programs; C the workbench for assembling data access and analysis pipelines; D the myExperiment workflow library that stores existing workflows; E the BioVeL Portal that allows researchers and collaborators to execute and share workflows; and F the documentation wiki. Infrastructure is indicated in bold, while processes related to research activities are indicated in italics. Components A–F are referred to from the text, where they are described in detail. See also ‘how-to’ guidelines in the Additional information