Workshop: Addressing data management challenges within integrative biodiversity projects; Spring/Summer; University of Florida

Cuny City College, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The ability to identify common mechanisms regulating the diversification, maintenance and/or loss of biodiversity in diverse ecosystems depends on having relatable data across habitats, time-scales, levels of biological organization and geographical regions. This workshop will bring together participants from six Dimensions of Biodiversity projects spanning terrestrial to marine systems, past and present time-scales, cellular to ecosystem levels of biological organization, and diverse geographical regions to discuss the challenges in making biodiversity data more comparable across projects. The ability to analyze comparable biodiversity data across disciplines will offer new opportunities to identify common themes across diverse ecosystems and enhance current and future management practices for diverse habitats. Fifteen people will attend the workshop including Full, Associate, and Assistant Professors, as well as postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. Participation by early-career scientists and groups under-represented in science will be prioritized. Four of the six Dimensions of Biodiversity projects participating will be represented by women researchers, and two of these six projects are based at Hispanic-serving institutions. This workshop will enhance interdisciplinary work within diversity-focused projects and facilitate joint data analyses across research teams. Dimensions of Biodiversity projects are fundamentally transdisciplinary, integrating across genetic, phylogenetic and functional aspects of biodiversity. Each of these core dimensions generates many different types of data, including locality and abundance, genomic sequence, environmental, paleoclimatic, and phenotypic information. Multiple projects also gather these data across a range of geographic scales (local to continental) and time periods (present day to thousands or millions of years in the past). However, the volume and heterogeneous nature of the shared datasets strain the current capacity to integratively address some of the most fundamental questions about biodiversity. This workshop will provide participants an opportunity to share challenges, findings, data management approaches, as well as discuss potential solutions.