Many research communities working in biology and related fields are committed to building and preserving a wide collection of environmental and species distribution data. In order for these communities to be able to carry out their studies in a fast and efficient manner, the data needs to be well organized, meticulously described and possibly represented in a standard format that enables re-use. In fact, the Network Common Data Format (NetCDF) is a self-describing, machine-independent data format that is meant to represent and store array-oriented n-dimensional data, widely used by many communities and research institutions as a standard.