How to better manage your data – and thereby enrich research

The workshop "How to better manage your data – and thereby enrich research" is offered as part of the of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society (GfÖ) of Germany, Austria and Switzerland 2023. An overview of all formats with which NFDI4Biodiversity is participating in the conference can be found here.

Today, the volume, complexity, and creation speed of research data are rising exponentially. While the awareness of the value of environmental data has been increasing, we still face the problem that research data is getting more transient. The reasons are that data vary in quality, are stored decentrally with no long-term perspective, and are thus not findable or reusable for other researchers. Further, they are often not standardized in format nor described properly using common metadata standards. However, in order to leverage the full potential of existing data, researchers need to work together and share their data in order to gain insight into complex ecological processes. The vast resources of biodiversity-related data enable the opportunity for analyzing complex processes across scales and in an interdisciplinary manner. Furthermore, research institutions and funders, but also publishers increasingly demand transparency and promote data sharing practices.

In order to make data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (see www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples) –, 'good' research data management is needed. NFDI4Biodiversity is part of the National Research Data Infrastructure, Germany. We boost research and support nature conservation by providing access to tools, and services for handling biodiversity and environmental data and to support good research data management.

We plan a conference workshop that is divided into three sections.

1. In the first section, we will teach the basics of research data management for ecologists across the whole data life cycle.
2. Section two will then focus on the “first step” in the data life cycle – planning a research project and the posterior publication of heterogeneous data via our submission system. This section addresses the importance of a data management plan with practical examples and how to prepare your data for publication/archival.
3. In the last section, we will share our experiences in the consortium NFDI4Biodiversity and offer insight into one of the tools/services provided by our partners. This hands-on section will focus on Data Discovery using the GFBio Service VAT (Visualization and Analysation Tool). The VAT system allows users to explore biodiversity data by visualizing, analyzing and transforming them in a comfortable online GIS environment. Beside integrating own data, it provides access to collections and biodiversity data centers, international data aggregators, and environmental data.

Participants need to bring their laptops with an internet connection.

The workshop will be held in two parts, part 1 from 14:00 to 15:30 and part 2 from 17:00 to 18:30.

Organizers & Speakers

• Dr. Daniel Tschink (GFBio e.V., dtschink@gfbio.org)
• Jimena Linares (GFBio e.V., jlinares@gfbio.org)
• Dr. Claas-Thido Pfaff (GFBio e.V., claas-thido.pfaff@gfbio.org)
• Dr. Ivaylo Kostadinov (GFBio e.V., ikostadi@gfbio.org)