Introducing the new staff roles on the new biodiversity data management project funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation
Five new contract positions are being funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation as part of a new project to enhance biodiversity data management, including data collation, data cleaning and data sharing.
The Bioinformatics and Science Manager is based at the Cape Research Centre in Cape Town for two years and will ensure that the project staff and contractors achieve the goals of the project. This includes the development of biodiversity information management tools to enable easier data access, cleaning, standardisation and sharing.
The Biodiversity Information Scientist is based at the Arid Research Unit in Kimberley for two years and will be collating biodiversity occurrence data for several national parks.
A scientist, based at the Rondevlei office for two years, will collate information on selected estuarine and freshwater systems in South Africa’s national parks and conduct reviews to develop state of knowledge reports for these important ecosystems.
A scientist, based in Skukuza, will collate information on pollinators and invertebrates in South Africa’s national parks and conduct reviews to develop state of knowledge reports on these groups.
A visual data scientist will work on developing systems to enable better curation and storage of visual data, including photographs from camera traps and videos from baited remote underwater videos.
All five of these positions will contribute towards achieving the overall goal of this exciting new project, which is to make useful biodiversity data available to improve conservation decision making.
The new staff members will contact scientific services staff about relevant data in the coming months to assist with getting this data standardised and stored for future use.
