Marine biodiversity data is crucial to understand the underlying processes driving the functioning of our ecosystems. However, there are still spatial and temporal gaps in its availability. Through the data archaeology activities in the framework of the LifeWatch Belgium project, this lack of information was addressed by resurfacing and digitizing existing historical collections of marine biological data hidden in books, field notebooks, tapes etc. It is our duty now to make this datasets freely available and interoperable for the scientific community.
We are seeking a motivated student who will be trained in our methods to make data interoperable so it can be reused and combined with any other datasets. This is a multi-task job that will require critical thinking to understand how the data was taken and how to translate it into a machine-readable language. She/he will have the chance of gaining in-depth insights on data management and quality control, using biodiversity standards like the Darwin Core and making the data available through data portals such as EurOBIS and EMODnet Biology.
The student will have the opportunity to work and be trained by the Data Centre of the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), an accredited data centre with a long history in the management of marine data. The Data Centre currently coordinates several databases/projects of international importance such as EMODnet Biology, EurOBIS, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), LifeWatch.be and MarineRegions.