Seasonal School 2024: RDM compact course generates great interest and positive feedback

Around 20 researchers attended the NFDI4Biodiversity Seasonal School 2024 and acquired basic data management skills within a week. In a new blog article, the organizing team looks back on a great week – and shares the course materials with everyone interested.

Joint project of the NFDI4Biodiversity expert network

Our second Seasonal School on research data management of biodiversity data took place at the beginning of December 2024. The five-day course was a joint project of various partner institutions of the NFDI4Biodiversity network and benefited from their great expertise: It was organized together with the Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), which is supported by the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the University of Leipzig and in cooperation with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). For NFDI4Biodiversity, the Federation for Biological Data (GFBio e.V.), the Research Data Management Unit at the Philipps University of Marburg, the Campus Institute for Data Science (CIDAS) at the University of Göttingen and, again, the University of Jena were involved in the planning.

Far more applications than places

We received more than 80 applications for the 21 available places, from which we selected a group of PhD students and research assistants. Together with 13 lecturers, we guided the participants through the complete data life cycle from Monday to Friday: starting with a plan for data collection, exploitation and long-term storage, followed by the collection and cleaning of new data, quality control and integration of (taxonomic) datasets from different databases and repositories, visualization and analysis, and finally publication of the data. As experts in the individual sections, the lecturers provided participants with presentations, lectures, hands-on sessions and advice and support.

“We received more than 80 applications for the 21 places available.”

The participants were provided with tools and services from NFDI4Biodiversity and other networks from the biodiversity community for each step. Among other things, data was collected by the participants with QField directly outside the office door, a similar training data set was provided with metadata using the Rightfield program, versioned with Git and connected to GitHub, cleaned with Open Refine and also with R and Python scripts in JupyterHub, extended with data from the TRY database and climate data from the ECMWF Climate Data Store and finally visualized withggplot2. The archiving and publication of the previously self-collected data was demonstrated by the curators of the PANGAEA Data Publisher for environmental data. Of course, not everything was new for all participants, but everyone was able to take away new or restructured approaches for their own work with research data.

Positive feedback and valuable suggestions for future courses

The event was rated positively by everyone involved, even though we as the organizing team had to deal with a few cases of illness and changes to plans. The half-hour warm-up phases in the morning with lively discussions and exchanges were particularly appreciated. We were able to learn a lot about the participants' specific challenges with data management in their respective research contexts.

For the next Seasonal School, we will work with the speakers to put even more preparation into better linking the individual contributions together with the help of a common framework. We also want to work on further improving the reusability of the tools and services presented. This will make it easier for participants to integrate the course content into their own day-to-day work and pass it on to their colleagues.

Course materials available online

For all those who are now interested: the presentations, Jupyter notebooks, training datasets and scripts have been published and are available or linked in a separate GitHub repository. Recordings of the individual presentations will be available on the NFDI4Biodiversity YouTube channel from January 2025.