Date: Friday, April 4, 2025
Time: 12:00–1:00 p.m. Atlantic time
Location: Room 137, Huggins Science Hall, Acadia University, and on Zoom
This talk will be presented by Paige Levangie, an MSc student in the Department of Biology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. It’s the sixth and final event in this year’s Atlantic Canada Data Science Tour, a hybrid seminar series organized by CANSSI Atlantic and geared toward upper-level undergraduates in statistics or computer science programs. The host will be Hugh Chipman, Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Acadia University.
We invite you to join us in person or online! (We’ll send you the Zoom link when you register.)
The introduction of research data management policy in Canada and subsequent data management plans attempt to provide more standard approaches to conducting and communicating research data to ensure that it is FAIR: (1) Findable, (2) Accessible, (3) Interoperable, and (4) Reusable. Globally, the emergence of the FAIR principles promotes the use of open access research tools to help format, analyze, and communicate research data. Making research data available is a crucial component to current research data management policy that requires researchers to upload research data to online repositories like OBIS, GBIF, and Dataverse. These repositories each have differing data standards (e.g., the Darwin Core Archive) that can be confusing to understand and use. In addition to data formats and storage, coding languages like R and accompanying interface software RStudio are popular and used to analyze and visualize data within many disciplines including ecology, yet require training and expertise. The increasing popularity of Large Language Models like ChatGPT and CoPilot to help create code to solve complex problems complicates the ability to provide detailed and accurate user prompts and contributes to researchers being undertrained and/or overconfident in their research data management abilities.
Current infrastructure for research data management tools is not equipped to address the growing variety in data formats and types within different ecological fields. Researchers are not equipped or trained with the proper skills and attempt to meet research data management policy requirements after the fact. This causes most ecological research to lack reproducibility and limits accessibility. To combat a lack of understanding in data formatting and coding skills, an open access free interactive tool, MURPH, was created to allow researchers to upload research data and produce various outputs. These outputs will allow users to reformat research data into OBIS format (using Darwin Core standards), and produce plots, tables, and maps. Users receive outputs and code used to generate them outside of the tool, which serves as a guide for future work. Overall, this tool is aimed to increase the knowledge, education, and understanding of research data management and communication practices in ecological research as they are made to be accessible, interactive, reproducible, and presented in formats that are broadly understood by online repositories.
Paige Levangie is from West Hants, Nova Scotia, and has attended Acadia University since 2021. She completed her Bachelor of Science Honours at Queen’s University and moved back home to start her master’s immediately after graduation. She is passionate about open research, data management, and coding in R. Outside of school, Paige spends most of her time curling, hanging out with her dogs, or cheering on her husband’s tug-of-war team.