“When I started in Biology, I wanted to make a contribution to biodiversity knowledge and to biodiversity conservation. So for my PhD, I studied a small mammal species for which a high genetic diversity had been identified…But I struggled a bit with the information available as not always it contained all the relevant data that I needed for my study. So that made me aware that it’s very important when we share data to include all the information that we collect so that it is reusable for the future…”
In this fourth episode of BioDT Talks, Joana Paupério, Biodiversity Project Manager at the European Nucleotide Archive (EMBL-EBI), talks about FAIR data and Biodiversity Digital Twins.

Let’s imagine that we are a research team that wants to understand how the genetic diversity of beetles in Europe varies across environments, so that we can model this variation for predictions of future scenarios. Would we be able to find all the relevant data? Probably not, as unfortunately not all data produced is published in a way that it is easy to find by users. Also, for the data that is findable, are we able to access it fully and is there contextual information on it? As for example, geographic coordinates of where the sample was collected, or additional biological information on the species, that is relevant for interpretation? Can we interpret the data correctly on the basis on the information available? Data may often be accessible, but sometimes hard to find and interpret because it does not have enough metadata or the metadata is not structured in a standardised way. And this is what the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles try to guide users toward.
What are the challenges that are associated with making Biodiversity Digital Twins fair? And what are the solutions being used in BioDT project? Watch the video, and find out more!