How much time do you waste on data chores?

One of the more difficult aspects of trying to apply “big data” thinking in ecology is the massive heterogeneity of terms. I stumble over this issue every time I work on a data set for the Encyclopedia of Life. The many different ...

My last post looked at a very small, but well studied rocky intertidal ecosystem and was able to identify a keystone predator (Pisaster) in a network using centrality measures. I was worried, though, that this method would not work on a larger, ...

A few weeks ago I announced a project that would train an algorithm to recognize important taxa in an ecosystem using the characteristics of species interactions within that ecosystem. This post documents the first bit of work I’ve ...

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how interactions between organisms in an ecosystem can be represented as a graph, with nodes and edges, similar to a social network. The nodes represent an organism or group of organisms while the edges ...

Last week I was in Portland, Oregon attending the annual meeting of Force11, a community interested in the future of research communications. There were many great speakers and panel discussions, but what interested me the most was the unveiling ...

Two weeks ago I attended the 7th Plenary of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) in Tokyo. I enjoy attending RDA Plenaries not only because of the interesting topics but also because of all my wonderful RDA colleagues. I was recently appointed the ...

One of the projects I’m working on now is integrating data about North American butterfly observations collected by about a dozen different citizen science butterfly monitoring programs. The people who collect the data are volunteers who are ...

One of the fundamental goals of biology is understanding the interactions of environment and phenotype, but this is a surprisingly difficult topic to study – not because of the concepts, but because of the data. Observations about ...

GenBank is a repository for genetic sequences sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. It holds over 100 million different sequences from organisms across the tree of life, from humans to mushrooms to amoebae. Studying genetic sequences ...

“Big Data” and machine learning are used in a wide variety of disciplines, from making credit and insurance decisions to driving medical research, but how accurate is this approach? If algorithms are ground-truthed used a biased ...