After a highly competitive recruitment process, the GBIF Secretariat has selected two regional support contractors to assist in establishing a dedicated team to support the GBIF network in Europe and Central Asia (ECA).
Oleg Borodin, an author, teacher, leader and former GBIF node manager from Belarus, and Salza Palpurina of the National Museum of Natural History at the Bulgarian Academy of Science (NMNHS) will start their new roles on 1 September 2023. Together, they will focus on helping data publishers and project teams, strengthening the GBIF community of practice, and targeting gaps in data and skills, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean.
These one-year half-time positions have been funded by GBIF Participant countries Norway and Finland through additional contributions into a special purpose fund for the Community and Capacity priority area of the GBIF 2023-27 Strategic Framework. Their leadership builds on both countries' previous support of data mobilization activities in Northern Eurasia, which has successfully increased access and use of biodiversity data for science and policy, strengthened skills and capacity, and advanced engagement across that region.
"We're both very pleased to welcome Oleg and Salza as regional support contractors and hope that adopting an approach that the other regions have proven successful will strengthen our own efforts," said Dag Endresen of Norway and Niels Raes of the Netherlands, ECA regional representatives on the Nodes Steering Group.
"We're eager for Oleg and Salza to extend our efforts and leverage their own depth of knowledge and experience of the parts of Europe and Central Asia that remain underrepresented in our network," said Mélianie Raymond, community and capacity manager. "Their strengths and connections are highly complementary and well aligned for building the skills, capacities and processes that countries not yet in GBIF will have to bridge."
Dr Palpurina and Dr Borodin joined a recent data mobilization course organized and led by the Asian regional support team, building and refreshing their familiarity with GBIF training materials they expect to apply within the ECA. The Asian team, like those in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and now the ECA, provides an additional layer of support and coordination for the efforts of node managers, data publishers and volunteer trainers and mentors, playing key roles in help-desk support and outreach to individuals and institutions in non-participant countries. The development of these teams responds to a recommendation in the CODATA Twenty-Year Review of GBIF to strengthen nodes by stabilizing and extending the regional networks.
Salza Palpurina is a research assistant in botany and data scientist at NMNHS. Her pursuit of research and conservation projects on plant biogeography and vegetation ecology—particularly fine-scale diversity patterns in Eurasian dry grasslands—has established connections with relevant research institutions in places like Serbia, Ukraine, Turkey and Armenia. Such relationships form a foundation for expanding the community of practice in key subregions the new team is targeting and engaging and recruiting individual contributors from museums, environmental NGOs and universities. Along with her background as a trainer in both formal and informal settings, Palpurina will pair her technical proficiency in data manipulation and processing to her skills and experience in working with databases, data processing, APIs, and the widely used statistical programming language, R.
Oleg Borodin acted as the driving force behind Belarus joining GBIF in 2019 and was the country's first GBIF node manager. An expert and leader in biodiversity with wide-ranging experience, he is now pursuing a second PhD in zoology at Daugavpils University in southeastern Latvia. Along with 20 years of teaching at Belarusian State University, Borodin is the author of more than 180 publications, including scientific monographs, a textbook on the animals of Belarus, and a Russian-language guide to preparing datasets for GBIF. He has represented Belarus in international science-policy fora like Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). Borodin also drafted the country's Sixth National Report to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and served in 2019-2020 an alternate member of the CBD's Bureau of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA).