FRB-CESAB DataShare

Funding is available for international working groups led by at least one French researcher to build and format datasets of ecological values in order to improve their accessibility.

The Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversité (FRB – Foundation for Biodiversity Research) is a foundation for scientific cooperation. One of its objectives is to establish a sustainable partnership between public organisations and businesses in the field of biodiversity research and related issues, such as the conservation or management of genetic resources. The FRB therefore helps to coordinate research on biodiversity, to encourage multidisciplinary and partnership-based approaches, particularly with businesses and private research, and to pool resources around collective proposals on these issues.

One of the Foundation’s key programmes is the Centre de synthèse et d’analyse de la biodiversité (CESAB – Centre for the Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity), which aims to implement innovative work to synthesise and analyse existing biodiversity data.

FRB-CESAB is providing funding through its DataShare call with the aim of accelerating and promoting efforts to fuel future syntheses and meta-analyses of datasets relating to biodiversity. The call will pair a working group with scientists from CESAB to build and format their datasets of ecological values, rendering them accessible, interoperable and easily usable by others.

Any dataset of ecological values anywhere on Earth, from any time, submitted to any level of anthropogenic influence is eligible for support through this call. Socioeconomic health and/or environmental data will also be considered if there is a clear link to biodiversity, Of particular interest are cross-level datasets that combine different levels of biodiversity.

Dataset proposals will be considered if they aim to collect mostly unpublished data or if they are a compilation and curation/harmonisation of data from published and/or unpublished sources. Proposals that aggregate or transform existing data are also eligible if they can demonstrate their added value.

The call may act as a preliminary step before submitting a research proposal to a classic biodiversity synthesis call (eg CESAB, sDiv, NCEAS), though this is not mandatory.

Groups are expected to meet at CESAB three times over the duration of the project. Each meeting will last five days. In addition, groups are expected to organise a one-week virtual meeting and regular short virtual meetings throughout the project’s duration.