ZMT - Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung

20/02/2020 | With permanent funding from the federal and Länder governments of around 500,000 euros per year, the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) can expand its digital infrastructure to evaluate heterogeneous research data from tropical coastal regions using modern data science methods. Thus, social science and marine science data can be systematically linked in order to gain new insights with transdisciplinary relevance. This data science approach is supported by a strengthened research data infrastructure at ZMT.

ZMT has been conducting research in tropical countries for more than 25 years and can look back on a long history of collecting natural and social science field data from tropical marine habitats. "With federal and state funding, we can digitally process ZMT's trove of data further and set the cornerstones to make the results of our research not only available to the local scientific community and various stakeholders from politics, industry and society, but also to make this common resource directly usable for our partners in the tropics," says Prof. Dr. Hildegard Westphal, Scientific Director of ZMT. "With the Data Science approach, a new added value is drawn from the data and the cooperation with the partners is strengthened."

Dr. Nicolas Dittert, Managing Director of ZMT and expert in research data management, adds: "Open access to research data is one of the great challenges for science. Therefore, ZMT has already taken steps to lead the institute into the digital future. The establishment of a research data infrastructure for the integration of heterogeneous research data from tropical coastal regions is part of our so-called DigiZ initiative to develop a digital ZMT."

With DigiZ, the ZMT contributes to the digitization strategy of the Leibniz Association as well as to the data infrastructure initiatives of the German Alliance for Marine Research (DAM). The great relevance of these initiatives lies in the rapidly growing amount of data and the need to improve accessibility and usability, and is a response to the rapidly developing possibilities of data science. Especially in marine research with its global perspective and in interdisciplinary research, these new approaches to the recognition of patterns and relationships are very promising.

Two vcacancies are currently advertised as part of the DigiZ initiative: https://www.leibniz-zmt.de/de/jobs.html