Francis Strobbe

Background

About Francis Strobbe

I currently work at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) as Scientific Data Manager and Data Steward.One recent accomplishment where I am particularly proud of is the South Africa Biodiversity Data Pipeline for Wetlands and Waterbirds (BIRDIE). Together with my colleague, we built a full-stack wetland and waterbird web application, around a modular data analysis pipeline for converting raw data into decision-quality analytics. The development of the data pipeline, the data mart, webservices, OpenAPI documentation, map viewer and reporting pages was done at RBINS.I'm currently in the process of setting up an institute-wide data architecture for the digital collections data, emphasizing open data, high-value datasets (following DCAT-AP), and FAIR data principles. The architecture integrates REST APIs and OpenAPI to ensure seamless data accessibility and interoperability.I'm also overseeing the publication of High-Value Datasets to both national and international open data portals, including data.gov.be and data.europe.eu, ensuring compliance with open data standards and maximizing accessibility and visibility of the datasets and their applications.For two years, I worked at EC EMODnet Secretariat and Seascape Belgium as Data & Communication Officer. Previously, I already worked at RBINS. I was involved in ENVRI-FAIR (http://envri.eu/envri-fair/) and the EMODnet Data Ingestion project and EMODnet Chemistry My professional background is in aquatic habitat biodiversity and ecology. During my PhD at KULeuven (Belgium) & Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA), I dug into ecological speciation (adaptive radiation) driven by predation in the damselfly genus Enallagma. I looked at selective environments and the genetic makeup of key species that went through two independent habitat shifts. Then, I took a turn from science, more into the realm of data, databases, websites and vizualisations, and I was given the opportunity to create the Belgian Species List portal at Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS, Belgium), which is an online taxonomic backbone of species found in Belgium. On top of this website, I developed the Belgian Bioarchaeological Inventory node, a database and online tool to find archaeozoological info about findings in Belgium. During a postdoc at SANBI/UCT (Cape Town, South Africa), I explored the development of biodiversity data analysis pipelines. This eventually led to the development of the monitoring platform BIRDIE.