Ecology Platforms

BioSense participates in a range of pan-European initiatives that aim to centralise environmental data coming from various regions, sources and institutions. Such a database would provide researchers, government institutions and NGOs precious information about the state of ecosystems around Europe along with an insight on how they are changing in time.

Environmental and ecological data is very heterogeneous. It encompasses logs from sensors, expert observations, photos from smartphones and UAVs, lab analyses and others. Individual data from one source or one region provides little information, as it cannot be analysed in a wider context. Also, data is usually kept at individual institutions separately, which poses further hurdles for comprehensive analysis and directly contradicts the EU principles of open science.

For these reasons, we participate in a suite of European projects where we are developing a platform for deposition of environmental and ecological data. The platforms facilitates networking between European institutions and a collaborative approach to tackling the problems of climate change, global warming, habitat loss and altered competitive relationships within flora and fauna.