Course
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 course schedule.
Teachers: Urmas Kõljalg, Kessy Abarenkov, Hanna Koivula, Allan Zirk, and Veljo Runnel
Organizer: Dmitry Schigel
Target group: 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.
Course credit: 2 ECTS
Travel, accommodation and food: ForBio members will be covered for room (max 6 nights) during the course. In addition, ForBio members based in Norway will be covered for travel expenses. NB Travel to Tallinn from Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Stockholm is inexpensive. ForBio associates are encouraged to participate, but will need to cover their own expenses.
Application. Apply here. Application deadline August 20th.