The "Biodiversity data management and Open Data" course will take place in Tartu, Estonia on 2 - 5 November 2016.

This is a course on exploring data tools beyond MS Excel and R. What are the modern, efficient, mistake-proof ways to collect and manage field and lab data, identifiers, traits, and environmental variables? How can you store your data to easily integrate with external databases?

This hands on course covers the basics of data collecting, data management, and publishing data as Open Data. Students will learn how to: 1) collect taxon occurrence or sample based data; 2) handle their data by keeping standards and quality aspects in mind; 3) create integrated databases for the different data types (observations, specimens, sampling areas, samples, DNA sequences, traits, interactions, references); 4) manage and share datasets; 5) publish datasets with DataCite (DOIs), in GBIF, or in online journals (Pensoft). Practical work and lectures will be followed by a half-day BioBlitz and publishing the collected data (see the Program).

The course is targeted to early PhD and MSc students in biology and related disciplines. 15 course participants will be selected based on their abstracts. Because of the nature of funding and co-funding, 25% of slots will be given to participants coming from Estonia, 25% to those from Russia, the rest to the Nordic and Baltic countries (see For students).

Supported by:

SIU logo      ForBio logo      UT NHM logo