BITW 2013 students. © Michelle Koo

During the summers of 2012 and 2013, VertNet hosted five-day courses designed to engage participants with compelling questions in biodiversity research and to focus on the process and scope of a research project, including data acquisition, tools for data evaluation, analysis, and project dissemination and outreach. Participants were exposed to the fundamentals of biodiversity informatics and became users of cutting edge tools in GIS and modeling. Virtual talks by research professionals from across the U.S. provided opportunities for discussion about how others use informatics tools and workflows. Participants explored:

• Data sources for discovery, acquisition, data standards, database creation and organization (VertNet, GBIF, Darwin Core)
• Organization, analysis, workflow, and data improvement tools
• Biodiversity measurement and analysis techniques
• Species distribution modeling approaches
• Dissemination, education, and outreach mechanisms (e.g., citizen science)

The goal of these workshops was to provide a conceptual framework and hands-on experience with a suite of data sources such as VertNet (including MaNIS, FishNet, HerpNET, and ORNIS), Encyclopedia of Life, Map of Life, and other software tools (e.g., GEOLocate, Quantum GIS, R Statistics, ArcGIS, Maxent).

At the end of the week, participants left with:

• an understanding of the evolution of, and the workflows within, a research project;
• a set of basic skills to use data repositories, informatics and analytic tools, and an understanding of which tools are appropriate for specific tasks;
• knowledge of the abundant resources and additional training available to them.