Slide 1 (5 sec)
Hi everyone! Welcome to the update form GBIF Norway.

Slide 2 (42 sec)
GBIF Norway is involved in an initiative called BioMedData. It’s a collaborative project between ELIXIR Norway and 10 other molecular life science research infrastructures. We have group bi-monthly meetings and other activities. For example there was a FAIR data management course this Wednesday and most recently there was a workshop to develop a data management plan (DMP) tool. Our long-term goal in this partnership is obviously to help publish species occurrences from the participating research infrastructures but also to ensure that GBIF molecular sequence data gets published to ELIXIR. 

Slide 3 (28 sec)
BioDATA teaching activities in 2020 were severely affected by the COVID travel restrictions. So we have been adapting the curriculum for online training together with Laura at the Secretariat. We have also been working on adding an extra course on meta-barcodes together with colleagues in Georgia.

Slide 4 (56 sec)
In February this year we applied to the Norwegian Agency DIKU for funds for a new BioDATA project called BioDATA Advanced. The project partners are the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo; staff including Hugo de Boer (HoD), me (Rukaya Johaadien), and Dag Endresen; The South-Siberian Botanical Garden in Russia; and in South Africa we have SANBI where Fatima Parker Ali is the GBIF Node Manager and point of contact; and of course Dmitry Schigel and Laura Russell in the Secretariat is also involved. We plan to have 8 biodiversity data skills courses and 6 student internships. Keep your fingers crossed fro us, we should hear weather our application has been successful very soon. Hopefully before the end of the month, I believe.

Slide 5 (32 sec)
GBIF Spain, Portugal, Norway, Colombia and France developed together a GBIF CESP funded project, the OpenPSD, to provide guidelines and develop capacity enhancement in the private sector industry for using and publishing GBIF-mediated data. From Norway we approached the oil energy sector and private companies providing impact assessments for the environment policy purposes.

Slide 6 (35 sec)
Together with the Norwegian Environment Agency and colleagues from the emerging Living Norway Ecological Data Network - and extension of the GBIF node, we have been working on developing guidelines for environmental DNA data to enter the data workflow of GBIF. And, in particular, we have struggled with the compatibility of Darwin Core for ecological occurrences of community data and Nature Type data.

Slide 7 (23 sec)
As COVID pushed teaching online we provided a digital symposium on biodiversity informatics and GBIF metadata standards for a group of PhD students in Trondheim working with citizen science methodology to solve problems in ecology. And also provided student lectures on the master level.

Slide 8 (13 sec)
Our GBIF training course on GBIF data access and use with R, developed for the Nordic Oikos conference in 2018 is still being reused. Most recently by students in Tromsø.

Slide 9 (3 sec)

Slide 10 (19 sec)
Hi, I am Rukaya Johaadien and I work as the data manager at GBIF Norway. And I am Vidar Bakken, I work part-time for GBIF Norway. I work mainly to get datasets into the GBIF system.

Slide 11 (32 sec)
And I am Dag Endresen the Node Manager for GBIF Norway. Before we close I will give a brief update an ongoing process in the node. We are currently in between funding periods. And pending decision from the Research Council (RCN) we start a new 5-year period soon. In the next period we will re-organize the node as a national consortium partnership including colleagues in the node staff from across more institutions. Thank you for listening to the update from GBIF Norway.

Slide 12 (3 sec)