Dr Amanda Buyan1
1EcoCommons, Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO, Canberra, Australia
EcoCommons’ vision is to empower Australian researchers, practitioners, students and educators to use trusted, world-leading ecological and environmental modelling tools to protect and restore the planet. EcoCommons will transform ecological and environmental research by creating a trusted platform for many digital modelling and analysis needs. Our aim is to significantly reduce the time and wrangling needed to get from data to high-impact results which can enable solutions for our environment and its future. As finding the most appropriate data to solve a problem in a data-rich world is a bottleneck for many researchers, streamlining researchers’ ability to choose the right data with minimal wrangling is a must. EcoCommons offers two avenues to access a number of up-to-date, curated datasets: i) via API-connection with trusted data repositories (ALA, GBIF, Knowledge Network, etc), or ii) by downloading data from reputable sources, pre-processing and quality-checking the data before providing it as a ‘curated collection’ to users. Here, we will show how datasets enter EcoCommons as new curated collections, consisting of the following steps: 1) choose data source and confirm the datasets’ license, 2) download and pre-process the data, 3) ensure we have all relevant associated metadata, 4) upload the data and metadata to the development server for quality control and 5) deployment onto the production server. We will also showcase EcoCommons’ Data Explorer and integration with CSIRO’s Knowledge Network to highlight the ease of finding high-quality data on EcoCommons, so they can create better models to protect and restore the planet.
Biography:
Dr. Amanda Buyan is the Data Analyst at EcoCommons, and is based at the Atlas of Living Australia in the National Collections and Marine Infrastructure department at CSIRO. In her current role, Amanda uses her extensive Python skills and data wrangling expertise to ensure that the data entering EcoCommons is high-quality and suitable for environmental and ecological modelling.