Bridging the Pit of Doom for Arctic Benthic Data

A data warehouse for benthic biodiversity data is currently being build. It acts both as an internal workbench for ecologists to explore, curate, and visualize data, as well as a backbone for complex analysis, story telling and stakeholder services. It provides a solution to transfer spreadsheet data into a database.

BACKGROUND

Contemporary machine learning methods are more data hungry than ever and, in principle, biodiversity data are abundant, but transitioning from spreadsheet data management to well implemented databases is challenging. The transition costs in terms of data tidying and meta data research are significant, and data are at risk of being lost. Particularly, for historic data, which are mostly conceptualized within the context of a usually narrow defined research question, these transition costs create a pit of doom in which many datasets are currently being lost.