Mrs Matina Nikolopoulou from the LifewatchGreece core team participated in the First Workshop IODE - Expanding OBIS with environmental data that took place in Oostende, Belgium at 5 - 7 October 2015.

Expanding OBIS with environmental data is a small-scale pilot project. The main objectives of this project are to ensure mixed data sets stay together,  to demonstrate that OBIS nodes, which hold mixed data sets, can collaborate on the joint management and exchange of biodiversity observation data including environmental measurements, and to show what the benefit of this approach is for marine sciences, biological analysis and modeling.

The data collected for biological studies most of the time includes more than just biological parameters. Often additional physical and chemical measurements, and observations of the habitat are collected to study the organism in its environment. These combined data are needed for the study of ecosystem functioning, ecological niche modeling, climate change, etc. However, scientists collecting these mixed datasets currently do not have good mechanisms or a global data system, for sharing these data with their peers. The OBIS  data systems, which are based on the Darwin Core data schema, and the Integrated Publication Toolkit, are able to capture and share these mixed datasets.