Community Metrics

Data Use
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Join us for the next technical support hour for GBIF nodes on April 2nd at 4 pm CEST, where the topic is Community Metrics .

Community Metrics is a new initiative to develop new metrics, indicators and time series data products from GBIF-mediated data that can better support decision-making. The aim is to build on what is currently provided via GBIF´s data analytics and for this to build on work that the community has already done in this area. In the session, Andrew Rodrigues and John Waller present the idea behind the initiative and ways that the node community can actively contribute via the CommunityMetrics GitHub repository.

We will be happy to answer any question relating or not to the topic. Please feel free to post questions in advance in this thread or write to helpdesk@gbif.org.

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Very interesting subject, thanks.
Developping new metrics is really important but should take into account the inevitable biaises of observations.
Occurrences published on GBIF only represent an infinitesimal part of what can be observed on earth. Taking into account over-monitored and under-monitored species or sites is crucial to deliver valuable indicators. Therefore, measuring the monitoring efforts of our community and the well known temporal, geographical and taxonomic gaps is essential.
Happy to further discuss this during the next technical support hour.

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Thanks André for this. In any kind of analysis there will be underlying assumption and biases that we will have to deal with. Some of these will be easier than others to address but what will be important is supporting people with the interpretation of those metrics, which is why we want to have fully documented and open processes around the development of these metrics. We currently have no predefined idea for what metrics we might want to develop but it may well be in the scope of this work to think about can we develop a metric that allows us to evaluate to what extent new data coming into GBIF are addressing some of those inherent biases. Right now everything is up for discussion :slight_smile: