Fiona Hodge

Ministry for the Environment | Senior Advisor - Science

Fiona is a senior advisor at the Ministry for the Environment (MfE), mainly focused on improving New Zealand’s national biodiversity information. She has worked on national environmental reporting, environmental indicators, national environmental monitoring standards. Her current focus is the creation of the terrestrial national ecosystem typology, exploring indigenous biodiversity environmental limits, and helping data owners to share data to GBIF. She has been at MfE over 10 years, prior to that has done environmental monitoring for DOC and an environmental consultancy.

Abstract

Overcoming technical bottlenecks in data sharing - the eDNAbridge R package

Environmental DNA (eDNA) is a powerful new tool for biomonitoring, biosecurity, ecology and conservation. However, the process to publish eDNA datasets into openly accessible repositories presents a challenging process that impedes open data sharing for the greater good. This talk introduces eDNABridge, an R package developed for the Ministry for the Environment in collaboration with GBIF New Zealand, Wilderlab and New Zealand data owners that automates the flow of eDNA results from laboratories directly into the global GBIF data repository. We present results from a pilot study, including over 4500 sampling results, and show how standardisation and automation can enable the timely reporting of complex data at scale to the benefit of a diverse group of stakeholders.