Darwin Core Data Package: A Practical Evolution to Support Richer, Deeper, and New Biodiversity Data Sharing

After more than fifteen years of use, the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) (GBIF 2021) has become the most popular means of sharing species occurrence and sampling-event data. But it has a limitation: in its “star-schema” structure, all information must connect directly to a single “core” table. As biodiversity data publishing expands to include molecular, ecological, and behavioral information, publishers increasingly encounter cases where valuable relationships among entities—events, agents, organisms, materials, media—cannot be expressed, resulting in the loss of information. The Darwin Core Data Package (DwC-DP) (Darwin Core Maintenance Group 2025a) arose from this tension. It represents a practical evolution of Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012), retaining its familiar vocabulary while adopting a more flexible, relational structure. Rather than replacing DwC-A, DwC-DP complements it, offering an alternative for datasets that challenge DwC-A’s constraints. DwC-DP supports nested hierarchies of MaterialEntities, Media