Funded by the Croatian science foundation Antica Čulina of the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb aims to establish the first meta-research group that focuses on ecology, further strengthening Croatia’s position in a global scientific landscape. The project team is gathering experts from Ruđer Bošković Institute, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Zagreb, Bielefeld University (Germany), and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.
Two PhD students and one postdoc (to be employed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb) will contribute to the multidisciplinary project team from the collaborating institutions to address the challenge! If you are interested, keep track of the coordinator posts on LinkedIn, since one postdoc and one PhD are starting in March 2024 and September 2024! The work will revolve around the use of open data in an ecological meta-analysis, creating a framework for decreasing unused ecological research and developing and evaluating tools for more efficient ecological research. We will be developing and evaluating these on various ecological questions, and the exact questions will depend on postdoc/PhD interests. We have a wonderful international network of collaborators! Alongside general research skills, the postdoc/PhD will have the opportunity to gain skills in data science, open science, and evidence synthesis. These open up career opportunities within but also outside of academia.
Challenge: Unprecedented anthropogenic pressures put ecological research at the center of efforts to maintain ecosystem services supporting life on Earth. In this capacity, ecology is increasingly becoming a predictive and scalable science. However, the transition is hampered as most ecologists do not make use of novel opportunities to integrate existing data across scales. Further, much of the ecological research remains unused, as we recently identified. Therefore, it is pressing to drastically empower ecological research. Solution: EcoOpen will capitalize on the global momentum of meta-research and open science developments. It will use these to develop solutions to reduce unused research and foster scientific breakthroughs by facilitating the uptake of a rich landscape of existing ecologically relevant information.
How: We will develop protocols, tools, and methods for the use of open data and other open science artifacts in evidence synthesis and broader. We will guide their development using the meta-research approach. Meta-research is a burgeoning interdisciplinary research line that investigates the scientific system to optimize it. Specifically, we will quantify the benefits of open science artifacts and technical and social barriers to their use, building trade-off models. We will demonstrate the benefits of developed tools by addressing several fundamental questions in ecology on a global scale, using state-of-the-art approaches to evidence synthesis. Tools developed in EcoOpen will foster scientific breakthroughs in ecology.
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