Our EDI Summer Fellow developed workflows to visualize and publish IFCB data products

In summer 2019 we had the wonderful opportunity to host Kathy Qi (see photo) as an Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) Fellow. The EDI Summer Fellowship program sponsors undergraduate, graduate, and recent postgraduate students at a variety of host institutions across the U.S. with training in ecological data management. Kathy is an undergraduate majoring in Marine Biology with a minor in Computer Science at the University of California San Diego. Her project, titled ““Contributing datasets from plankton imaging systems deployed at the NES-LTER for Essential Ocean Variables and Essential Biodiversity Variables,” involved the development of workflows to contribute datasets from plankton imaging systems to EDI that meet the “R” for re-usable in the FAIR data principles.

Kathy focused on data from an Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) that was sampling continuously the underway science seawater on the NES-LTER Winter 2018 Transect cruise. We have already adopted some of the software that Kathy developed into our workflows for data resulting from other imaging systems used in the NES-LTER project. Kathy says about her first-hand opportunity to work with EDI and the NES-LTER project: “By going through the entire data pipeline from collection to analysis to publication, I was able to understand how scientists and information managers communicate to work together. This internship encapsulated both biological sciences and software development, allowing me to learn new, useful tools and practices that will aid me with future career advancement.”

Update: Featured data package for May 2020 EDI Newsletter: https://environmentaldatainitiative.org/edis-featured-data-contributions/phytoplankton-imaging-nes-lter/

Kathy Qi, EDI Fellow with NES-LTER in Summer 2019. Photo courtesy Kathy Qi.