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Biodiversity Informatics Training Workshops, originally developed for VertNet (NSF-DBI-1062193)

Biodiversity Informatics Training Workshops

Biodiversity Informatics Training Workshops, originally developed for VertNet (NSF-funded).

In 2012 and 2013, VertNet hosted five-day courses designed to engage participants from around the world with compelling questions in biodiversity research and to focus on the process and scope of a research project, including data acquisition, tools for data evaluation, analysis, and project dissemination and outreach. Participants were exposed to the fundamentals of biodiversity informatics and became users of cutting edge tools in GIS and modeling. Virtual talks by research professionals from across the U.S. provided opportunities for discussion about practitioners use informatics tools and workflows.

Workshop participants explored:

• Data sources for discovery, acquisition, data standards, database creation and organization (VertNet, GBIF, Darwin Core)
• Organization, analysis, workflow, and data improvement tools
• Biodiversity measurement and analysis techniques
• Species distribution modeling approaches
• Dissemination, education, and outreach mechanisms (e.g., citizen science)

The goal of these workshops was to provide a conceptual framework and hands-on experience with a suite of data sources such as VertNet (including MaNIS, FishNet, HerpNET, and ORNIS), Encyclopedia of Life, Map of Life, and other software tools (e.g., OpenRefine, GEOLocate, Quantum GIS, R Statistics, ArcGIS, Maxent).

Visit VertNet Workshops!

Now: UC Berkeley and beyond

Geospatial Innovation Facility Workshop in Modeling

Tutorial Scripts:

• Introduction to R for complete beginners!

• Acquiring and Exploring Species Occurrence data

• Species Distribution Modeling in R

Related Gists (basically made up on-demand from participants): R snippets