Looking into data management in Scientific Services: report back on an online data management workshop.
The staff of Scientific Services don’t spend enough time on data management. This is important because good data management is fundamental to the success of South African National Parks.
Scientific Services is mandated to inform biodiversity conservation. With a goal to achieve this, SANParks invests substantial amounts on funding staff to conduct monitoring and research. However, insufficient data management leads to a loss in this investment if the data are not analysed and used to inform conservation management.
On the 17th of April 2024, an online data management workshop was held and attended by > 60 SANParks staff, primarily from Scientific Services. The participants included three General Managers, three managers, 20 scientists, three regional ecologists, two GIS analysts, three science liaison officers, 12 technicians, 14 interns, and one curator.
During the online meeting, polls were run, and most staff indicated that data management is extremely important. However, it became evident that staff do not have enough time to conduct all the data management tasks that they should be doing to get the best return on the investment that has been made on collecting biodiversity data. Staff mentioned that they are overwhelmed: they have too many other tasks that they need to do and that data management is not prioritised.
Scientific Services staff at SANParks have a diverse set of tasks that comprise their key performance areas. They often have many balls in the air at any one time, with many demands on their time.
Despite data management being fundamental to the role of a scientist, the overwhelmed SANParks scientist doesn’t spend enough time on data management because of all the other demands on their time.
In the past, all the aspects of data management were not specifically included in key performance areas, which is something that is starting to change as we engage more about the importance of and gaps in data management at SANParks.
Data management includes data entry, cleaning, manipulation, storage, backup, sharing and developing metadata and data management plans.
A very clear outcome of the online meeting in April 2024 was that substantial amounts of time are spent on data cleaning and that there is still a very large volume of data cleaning that needs to be done. A situation where data cleaning is a bottleneck suggests that large volumes of data are not being analysed and therefore, these datasets are not being used to inform conservation management. This is a problem for a department whose core business is informing conservation management.
Going forward, the data management team will be looking into options for accessing further data management capacity and providing easier access to information and tools to help with data cleaning and other data management activities as well as running further online sessions to assist with areas of data management that SANParks staff struggle with.
SANParks staff can read more about the outcomes of the online data management workshop in the internal report that was written about the online workshop.
Spear, D. 2024. Looking into data management in Scientific Services: report back on an online data management workshop. May 2024. Internal Report 13/2024. Scientific Services, South African National Parks.
Below is an infographic on the importance of data management at SANParks.
