Organisation

Organisation

Organization

Presently over 110 participants from 32 European countries are involved in the EUdaphobase COST Action. They are organised into seven Working Groups (WGs) set up to best tackle the scientific objectives along a workflow from data structures and data collation, software development, to assessment-tool development and data users. 

Working Groups Diagram
Working Groups Diagram

The Management Committee (MG) consists of two national delegates from each participating country and is responsible for the overall coordination of the Action and regular interaction with WG leaders. European Agencies and non-COST “Near Neighbour Countries” are non-voting MC observers. A Core group (CG)  composed of the Action’s chair and co-chair, the WG chairs and co-chairs, as well as the STSM, scientific dissemination and international-cooperation officers – is responsible for initiating and coordinating activities, submitting proposals to the MC for approval of activities such as short-term scientific missions (STSMs) and budget allocations. 

Working Groups

Development of peer-reviewed data vocabularies and ontologies as well as scientific and data-management quality-assessment procedures.
Identification of data sources as well as establishment of the procedures and tools necessary for collecting and integrating past, present and future data into a pan-European data warehouse.
Assessment of available trait data, harmonisation and collation as well as linking with species distributional data in the data warehouse.
Development of user-friendly and intuitive user interfaces (GUIs) to enable queries of data across taxonomic and functional groups over spatial scales to be easily accessed and evaluated.
Involvement of stakeholders and end users in the development of the data warehouse and its tools and securing its adaptation to stakeholders’ needs.
Determine which results assessment tools must offer stakeholders, secure the corresponding data linkages within the data warehouse and establish software algorithms needed for developing assessment tools.
Integrate microbial taxonomic morphological, functional and molecular data based on DNA sequencing (Operational Taxonomic Units (OTU), Sequence Variance etc.) at lowest possible taxonomic level (i.e. genus level) into Edaphobase.