Sofie Meeus
Sofie Meeus is a researcher and data steward at the Biodiversity Informatics team at Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium where she works at the interface of biodiversity research and informatics. She completed her PhD in evolutionary biology and population genetics at KU Leuven in Belgium and worked as a postdoctoral researcher on plant speciation and hybridization at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her research at Meise Botanic Garden mainly focused on using machine learning and citizen science to digitize, extract and improve the quality of data from herbarium collections, to study impact of climate change on tropical trees and to increase public awareness on invasive alien species.
Currently, as a data steward, and member of the Flemish Research Data Network and the Biodiversity Information Standards community, she guides and assists researchers, mainly in the field of taxonomy, in digitizing, standardizing and publishing their scientific data to global sharing repositories, such as the Global Biodiversity Facility. She also collaborates in several European projects that aim to improve access to biodiversity data such as the ‘Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library’ (BiCIKL) and the ‘Distributed System of Scientific Collections’ (DiSSCo).
FOCUS
Biodiversity informatics is an active community providing tools and data infrastructures for integrating data and linking different data types needed for biodiversity research based on FAIR data and Open Science principles. Within the biodiversity research community, however, data sharing beyond the own bubble is incipient and more effort is needed to connect the generators of data with the data infrastructures already linked into the biodiversity knowledge hub. The main goal of my ambassadorship is to contribute in bridging this gap and to create incentive for researchers to share their data FAIRly by 1) showcasing the advantages of open and linked data for researchers and 2) providing training and accessible best practices guidelines for publishing research outputs.
Conutry
Belgium
Talks, Publications and Outputs
- 2023-06-05 Data steward monthly consultation day at Meise Botanic Garden
- 2023-05-25 "News" article on the BiCIKL website explaining in layman's terms why standardizing biographical data is important in improving biodiversity data while highlighting infrastructures and organisations supporting and enabling this standardization
- 2023-05-16 Update of the disciplinary page on Biodiversity
- 2023-05-10 Promotion of the "Who-is-who in Natural history collections" leaflet
- 2023-05-10 Webinar OpenAIRE discovery portal
- 2023-05-08 Data steward monthly consultation day at Meise Botanic Garden
- 2023-04-04 Contribution (and translation) of a popular newsletter article on the B-Cubed project to the 10th Open Science newsletter distributed in six Flemish research institutes.
- 2023-03-30 Interview: RDA/EOSC Future Ambassadors interviews - about my ambassadorship and discipline
- 2023-03-29 Data steward monthly consultation day at Meise Botanic Garden
- 2023-03-23 Tweets about the RDA plenary
- 2023-03-20 P20 RDA 20 March panel.
- 2023-03-09 Attendance webinar “Technical and organisational measures when handling personal or otherwise confidential data” organized by Ghent University
- 2023-01-25 Presentation of a case (i.e. the Taxonomic Marketplace) for 'People Identifiers in Collections and Biodiversity data' during the workshop/hackathon organized by MOBILISE COST Action
- 2023-01-23 Contribution (and translation) of a popular newsletter article on the WorldFAIR project to the 9th Open Science newsletter distributed in six Flemish research institutes.
- Publication of leaflet on people identifiers in natural history collections
See also
Sophie's profile on the EOSC Future grants platform
Background information: EOSC Future open call programme
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