Living Norway Ecological Data Network is a new initiative to promote FAIR data management and reuse of Norwegian ecological data. The network currently involves seven Norwegian institutions that are involved with collection, curation, management, publication and/or use of ecological data scientific studies. To promote management of ecological data from Norwegian research institutions in agreement with FAIR principles, we will focus on both on contributing to the technological development, and to increase human know how and the general competence in biodiversity informatics. Once fully established, Living Norway will contribute to and be part of the Living Atlas community. Living Norway is embedded with the Norwegian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Because human welfare is inherently linked to the goods and services delivered by nature, the current degradation of the biosphere is among the most pressing and severe societal challenges. Unfortunately, much ecological data needed to solve the above challenge are not available to the research community, because they are stored locally at institutions or with individual researchers, they are not well documented, and they are not standardized. Given the complexity of the task it is absolutely pivotal to unlock these data sources, making it possible to integrate data from several sources in the quest for deeper insight into the natural world and the human pressure on biodiversity. Living Norway is a direct answer to this challenge, and will therefore be in high demand by the Norwegian research community.
We are currently at the stage where we actively work to secure funding for the planned activities. The network partners submitted a common application to the INFRA-program of Research Council of Norway fall 2018. Now that the network is established, we have already started some of the activities, although the volume of the activity will depend on the funding situation.
The network currently involve seven Norwegian institutions, but our ambition is that the number of involved institutions will continue to grow now that the network is established. Should you be interested in learning more about Living Norway Ecological Data Network, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can use the contact page above, or follow the link to the members of the steering committee that you find on these pages.