Biodiversity data: From data collection to publication

FRB-CESAB / PNDB / GBIF France training course

Published

November 5, 2025

Welcome

NoteRegistration to the training course

Registrations open each spring and the training course takes place during fall. More information is available on the FRB-CESAB website.

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This five-day training course, co-organized by the FRB-CESAB, the PNDB, and GBIF France aims to work on the different stages of the data lifecycle, from acquisition to opening, including management, storage and the drafting of data papers.

We will 1) contextualize the issues surrounding the understanding, sharing and (re)use of biodiversity data and metadata, and 2) enhance the skills of communities involved in one or more stages of the data lifecycle.

Program

General context

  • Current challenges in biodiversity data
  • The data ecosystem
  • Reproducibility concepts
  • What is data/metadata?
  • Major types of biodiversity data
  • Framework and good practices (data lifecycle, FAIR, etc.)
  • Data management plan

Data acquisition

  • Best practices for data collection
  • Major biodiversity databases
  • Major environmental databases
  • Data acquisition: Web portals, API & web scraping

Data management

  • Structure, formats & files
  • Processing & cleansing data
  • Introduction to OpenRefine
  • Virtual Research Environments

DataSHARE projects

  • FRB-CESAB DataSHARE projects
  • Zoom on Islets & PhenoFish groups

Legal aspects

  • Sharing, licensing, etc.

Opening data

  • (Meta)data: standards
  • Storage and archiving
  • Dissemination and sharing
  • Data & software paper

Prerequisites

  Please follow this tutorial to install your working environment before attending the training course.

WarningInstallation notes

For this training course, you just need to install R, RStudio IDE (optional) and Rtools (for Windows users only). Do not install git, Quarto, Pandoc or Docker. And do not forget to configure RStudio IDE as explaining here.

Material

All the material used in this training course (slides, data, exercises) is available at: https://github.com/biodiversitydata/

Citation

Casajus N, Coux C, Le Bras Y, Norvez O, Archambeau A-S & Pamerlon S (2025) Biodiversity data: From data collection to publication. An FRB-CESAB, PNDB & GBIF France training course. URL: https://biodiversitydata.github.io/

Contributions

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC By 4.0, unless otherwise noted.

See also

Discover the other training courses provided by the FRB-CESAB and its partners: https://frbcesab.github.io/training-courses/