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Introduction

My name is Lourens Veen, and I am a PhD student at the Computational Geo-Ecology group of professor Willem Bouten, which is part of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics. I am a computer scientist by training, and now work in the field of ecological informatics.

My research concerns the management and use of species observation data. Species observation data record the presence or abundance of a particular species at a certain time and location. They result from monitoring projects, incidental surveys, and skilled volunteers going out on their own to look for interesting new discoveries. A broad range of species is observed regularly, for different purposes and by different means. Thus, species observation data are highly heterogeneous in coverage, semantics and quality. My research aims to answer the following questions:

• How can these heterogeneous data be archived in a way that allows easy retrieval of all data relevant to a particular use, regardless of origin?
• How can the quality of "casual" observations be determined effectively and efficiently?
• How can information about absence of species be derived from large amounts of presence/abundance data?
• How do ecological models relate to the data they use? Can we automatically retrieve data suitable for use with a particular model, or determine which types of models can be used for a given data set.
  

Background

Between 2000 and 2007 I studied Computer Science at the University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherlands. In the spring of 2004, I did my minor in Geodata Processing and Spatial Information, at the ITC International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, and in the autumn of the same year I was at the ETH Zürich for a three-month internship with the Database Research Group. My MSc thesis, done at the University of Twente Database Group was on a noveldata structure for storing XML data efficiently.

After receiving an MSc (hons.) in Computer Science in 2007, I looked for an interesting job for a few months, and finally joined IBED in as a scientific programmer on the EcoGRID project.

University of Twente Department of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

University of Twente Database Group

ITC International InstituteforGeo-Information Science and Earth Observation

ETH Zürich Database Research Group

NDFF, EcoGRID and Gegevensautoriteit Natuur

I worked at IBED as a scientific programmer from 2007 to 2011. After about six months as a web application programmer, I became the lead software architect of the Dutch National Database of Flora and Fauna (NDFF). The NDFF is a collaboration with the Stichting Veldonderzoek Flora en Fauna (VOFF), a group of ten foundations that collect nature observation data. Much of these data come from a 13,000 strong army of volunteer observers. The other partner in the project is the Gegevensautoriteit Natuur, a non-profit organisation set up by the Dutch government to make these data available for public policy applications.

This "making available" can be split into two complementary activities. The first is building an IT infrastructure that enables the exchange of observation data between all the different organisations that produce and/or use these. The second is the development of techniques for scientifically sound, standardised and repeatable analysis and interpretation of the data. As a scientific programmer and software architect, I focused on the former, as a PhD student I am now working on the latter.


VOFF

Gegevensautoriteit Natuur