We got the grant!

by Owen Jones on Aug 14, 2017

On August 5, the COMPADRE/COMADRE team was awarded an NSF grant to further develop our matrix databases. The funded project, “An Open-Access Global Repository of Plant and Animal Demographic Data”, will be led by Judy Che-Castaldo at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, IL. This funding comes from the Advances in Biological Informatics program and will increase the function of the database and make it more user-friendly. [caption id="attachment_566" align="aligncenter" width="720"] Celebrating our grant success at the ESA meeting in Portland, OR[/caption] There are three main parts to the funded project. In the first part, we will finish transferring our data into a relational database, which will run more efficiently and be less error-prone than our old system of spreadsheets. A second part will be to build a data-entry portal that our digitization team will use, so that the data input will be consistent across our digitization nodes around the world. Down the line, this portal will be opened to other researchers who can then contribute their own matrix data. The third part of the project will be to refresh our database website to make it more accessible to a wide range of users, including researchers, teachers, students, and conservation managers. In addition to improvements to the database itself, we will also be bringing on board a project coordinator who will oversee data digitization and communication across all of our participating nodes. Together, we will develop educational materials and hold user engagement workshops at several scientific conferences each year to spread the word and encourage even greater use of our demographic matrix data for research and in classrooms. We are so excited about this next step in the COMPADRE/COMADRE project! We hope you will follow along and give us your feedback as we continue to make our databases better and more useful for you. By Judy Che-Castaldo