[Gbif-europe] 7th European Nodes Meeting - structuring the meeting

[Steve.Wilkinson at jncc.gov.uk]

Hi all,
This is a resend of something I sent to Anne-Sophie originally re. the agenda of the meeting and a proposal for trying to get the most out of it:

-       In the past these meetings have been long presentations of what is happening in each of these funding initiatives and not enough time (in my opinion) on deciding what we are going to do / how much shared interested we have and what we can actually do. Maybe that is how it will always be – but I am just wondering whether we could try and push that a bit.

-       Would it be possible ahead of the meeting to be creating a more defined set of potential areas? So, on my list I would have:

o   ALA roll-out in Europe looks like it will happen (though not clear on the extent). But what generic enhancements are people looking at? So, from the UK perspective I would really like to be thinking about on-line data capture and management. Ideally I would like to be pulling together a meeting including a range of partners from the UK and at least Artportalen to see what can be learned from what has been done already and sound out who would contribute to something more generic.

o   EU wide modelling – I am fairly sure that some of our (UK) species models would be more powerful if we ran them over much wider areas. To do this I dont need any of the work benches (we have our own) but what I am interested in data. So, is anyone interested in pulling together (and maintaining) a set of generic physical layers that we could feed into species modelling. Additionally under this there is the tricky issue of consistent taxonomy too.

o   Role of citizen scientists (/technicians) – one area that we are exploring here is with our Environment Agency. Specifically can we make more use of citizen scientists to observe particular suits of species that will give an indication of water quality. E.g. dragonflies or other invertebrates. This might help to target where you monitor (i.e. where the risk is highest). The challenge is whether this could be adopted more generally as an approach under the Water Framework Directive.

o   Come back to the seabird modelling – there was an idea at the last meeting around seabird modelling (e.g. in relation to windfarms). I have lost track of where we got to with the application build around this – but there has definitely been some work on modelling  that would be interesting to scale up to broader scales (e.g. North sea).
Just a thought. I also wonder whether we couldn’t have more communication before the meeting. So rather than telling each other things at the meeting could we have some updates ahead – written? Sorry – I am just worrying about spending another couple of days listening where I do get useful “nuggets” of information but is not that efficient use of time.
Thoughts/challenges welcome.
Best wishes
Steve


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