The EU BON workshop "Biodiversity research for and by citizens in Eastern Europe: tools, information services and public engagement" was organized to present the EU BON citizen science gateway, share accomplishments of the project, promote products, raise and discuss challenges of citizen science and facilitate networking between countries, especially eastern and central European countries.

There were 33 participants from Baltic countries and Finland and EU BON partners from Norway, Spain, Israel and Brussels. First day was showcasing the citizen science initiatives in Estonia, following best practice examples from EU BON consortium. During the second day the participants got a chance to learn the tools and methods for citizen science data management by ECSA and EU BON. This was followed by world cafe style discussion about the needs of citizen science initiatives and Pan-European citizen science gateway. One of the important conclusions for Baltic countries is that there is a need for stronger collaboration and supportive infrastructure to make citizen science more effective and also deliver accessible data to research community.

Some workshop participants also took part of Tartu Mini-BioBlitz on 29th June, first BioBlitz in Estonia. BioBlitz participants observed 239 species of animals, plants and fungi .

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Workshop agenda

Read a first hand report form the workshop in the two great blog posts by Egle Marija Ramanauskaite (a workshop participant from Lithuania):

http://seplute.tumblr.com/post/146841955105/citsci-overtakes-the-baltics-citizen-science

http://seplute.tumblr.com/post/146844410470/citizen-science-workshop-in-tartu-recap-of-day-2

Taking place from 14 to 16 March 2017, the Final EU BON Meeting served as a platform to present key outputs from the FP7 EU-funded project EU BON " Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network" which aims to advance biodiversity knowledge by building a European gateway for biodiversity information and by integrating and harmonising a wide range of biodiversity data.

Hosted by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and at the stunning backdrop of Botanic Garden in Meise, EU BON partners met with stakeholders from research, European policy and citizen science to learn about the project's results and outputs and to discuss the future of a European Biodiversity Observation Network.

Credit: Donat Agosti

EU BON represents a joint effort of 31 partners from 15 European countries, Israel, the Philippines, Brazil and more than 30 associated partners. The project worked on the establishment and adoption of new data standards, the development of tools, the integration of advanced techniques for data analysis and the development of new approaches and strategies for future biodiversity monitoring and assessment.

Group Photo; Credit: D. Schmeller

At the Final Meeting participants had the opportunity to learn about and test products and services developed by project members during the period 2012-2017. These include a range of tools for data analysis, such as GeoCAT -- a tool that performs rapid geospatial analysis to ease the process of Red Listing taxa and AquaMaps -- a toolkit that models the distribution and makes predictions of where aquatic species occur naturally. Another group of tools -- the GBIF Integrated Toolkit and ARPHA-BioDiv facilitates the process of data sharing, integration and publishing.

Among the services presented, worthy of special mention is the EU BON Unified Taxonomic Information Service (UTIS) that allows the running of a federated search on multiple European taxonomic checklists by scientific name or vernacular name strings. These include the Pan-European Species directories Infrastructure (EU-Nomen), the European Nature Information System (EUNIS), the Catalogue of Life, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), the GBIF Checklist Bank and the Plazi Treatment Bank.

All these web applications are bound together under the umbrella of the EU BON European Biodiversity Portal, with highly relevant contributions to the aims of the Group on Earth Observation's Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON). Besides applied tools and software, the portal also serves as an online library for manuals, guidelines, factsheets, case studies, policy recommendations and other documents.

Learn more about these tools in our Final Brochure.

For live updates, follow EU BON on Twitter, or like us on Facebook. See the live Tweet feed from the meeting at #eubongm.

A recent story, featured on CORDIS News, focuses on EU BON and its achievements. Based on a recent project's publication in ‘Nature – Scientific Reports’ and information from the project, the new item discusses important project outcomes, including the European Biodiversity Portal, and their contribution to drawing a more accurate picture of current biodiversity to aid efforts for sustainable governance of natural resources.

Here is a snippet from the news feature on CORDIS: 

A recent article published in the journal ‘Scientific Reports’ states, ‘Monitoring schemes provide an important source of information on biodiversity change, guiding further research, conservation assessment and planning.’ The article cites The European Biodiversity Portal, designed and implemented by the EU-funded EU BON project that offers researchers, policy-makers, and others interested in biodiversity, easy access to insights on trends and modelling techniques.

The project worked on the establishment and adoption of new data standards, the development of tools to enable collaborative research and the encouragement of citizen-scientists. As a result, EU BON, by building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, has created advanced techniques for data analysis along with new approaches for modelling and strategies for future biodiversity monitoring.

Read the full publication here.

In 2013, Doñana Biological Reserve will host the first meeting of WP5 EU BON testing and validation of concepts, tools, and services, focusing on the organization and planning of the forthcoming WP5 tasks. The meeting will take place in Palacio de Doñana, Huelva, Spain, from 2 to 4 April 2013.
The aim of the meeting is to bring together the experts in charge of the implementation of the WP5 tasks with the people responsible for the data architecture (WP2), the tools developers (WP3, 4) and the policy and dialogue responsible partners (WP6, 7, 8). The meeting aims at providing a precise definition of the responsibilities of the partners involved and discussing the organization of the work process.

Place and date: Joensuu, Finland, 19 March 2015

Venue: Joensuu Science Park, Digitarium and the Conference Facility "Network Oasis"

The 2nd EU BON training on data sharing tools will take place side by side to CETAF/EU BON informatics workshops (see full program and logistic details here). The event will be organised by UEF and Digitarium, EU BON consortium member and work package leader (WP2), in collaboration with CETAF ISTC and other EU BON work packages.

Next topics will be covered:

• Introduction to GEOSS, GEO BON, EU BON (Hannu Saarenmaa)
• Information architecture of EU BON (Antonio Garcia)
• Data standards, Darwin Core and extensions for sample-based quantitative data (Éamonn Ó Tuama)
• Demonstration of GBIF/EU BON IPT for monitoring networks (Larissa Smirnova and Franck Theeten)
• Practical exercise with sample dataset (Larissa Smirnova and Franck Theeten)
• Practical exercise with own data (all trainees)

The workshop will include lectures and hands-on work, so participants are required to bring their own laptops. We will provide information and instructions on software installations. If the participants want to install IPT tool themselves, they can read and learn how to de it here. For the practical exercises it’s recommended to bring  own data (taxonomic, monitoring).

By lending access via the Internet to biodiversity data in open data infrastructures, biodiversity informatics worldwide allows anyone, anywhere to access and analyze data about all types of life on Earth. In applying common standards, research not previously possible is enabled, and better decisions to conserve and sustainably use the biological resources of the planet made possible.

In this symposium an overview of present and future opportunities will be given alongside recent research presentations and demonstrations of up-to-date tools for providing and acquiring information, handling data and presenting results.

The symposium is arranged as an Oikos Satellite Symposium but is open to anyone, i.e. also those not attending the Oikos conference can register for the symposium.

This symposium is organised by Swedish LifeWatch, GBIF Sweden and Department of Ecology at SLU and it will take place on February 6 2017, in Ecology Building, Sölvegatan 37, Lund, Sweden.

For more information, please visit the official event's page: http://www.slu.se/biodiversity-informatics

The new BoschTools.com is live.

OX Tools announced that it is working with Royd Tool Group on a potential acquisition of its Tracer Tools business.

If you’re like a lot of busy contractors in the walls and ceilings industry, every day can be bid day if you’re working up multiple bids at the same time. 

The importance of training when it comes to new technology.

For many walls and ceilings contractors, the days of estimators working with full-size plans and a single digitizer are a thing of the past.

Technology seems to be simultaneously disrupting and driving change in today’s preconstruction industry.

Bon’s line of contractor-grade hand tools and materials for the building trades has been expanded to nearly 6,000 products and includes more than 200 new items in the company’s 2013 Master Catalog.

This line of non-sparking, non-magnetic hand tools is manufactured from special aluminum-bronze or copper-beryllium alloys that meet ATEX regulations for safe use in areas where hazardous, flammable or combustible vapors, liquids, dusts, or residues may be present.

For some workers, safety tools and knives are indispensible items. Experts from companies that manufacture these products spoke with Safety+Health via email about current trends in their respective markets, as well as some important things product purchasers and users should know.

Arlington, VA – The Mine Safety and Health Administration is offering two online tools intended to help mine operators and workers review violations of safety standards.

Washington – Calling current permissible exposure limits “antiquated” and “dangerously out of date,” OSHA administrator David Michaels unveiled two web-based resources he said will help companies keep workers safer around chemicals.

How can risk management tools be applied within EHS organizations?

Now available, Bullet Fiber is ideal for wiring telecom connections and demarcation locations in residential, commercial, and industrial applications.

Washington — The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ Worker Training Program has published Spanish-language versions of its resources on COVID-19’s impact on mental health and substance use.

Workers should be trained on safe procedures for working with tools. Tools can pose a safety risk when they are misplaced or improperly handled by workers.

According to NIOSH, the use of non-powered hand tools in work settings can contribute to musculoskeletal disorders. These injuries can be reduced if users choose the right tool for the job.

Tingling, numbness or pain experienced when operating vibrating tools should not be considered part of the job.

If you’re not giving much thought to how you choose hand tools, you should. That’s the message the Center for Construction Research and Training (also known as CPWR), via its choosehandsafety.org website, wants you to keep in mind.

The partnership is aimed at enhancing product capabilities, expanding market reach, and developing new distribution channels by leveraging both companies’ strengths.

The headlamp on a worker’s hard hat. The lanyard that prevents tools from dropping. The safety blade that smoothly slices through cellophane. These safety tools and knives – and countless more – not only help keep work processes running efficiently, they also help keep employees safe. Here, manufacturing industry professionals speak about what’s new in the field of safety tools and knives, and what workers need to know to stay safe.

Unsafe habits can develop from using portable power tools at home, and these habits can creep into the workplace

Does your knowledge of safety knives make the cut? Here, an industry insider shares his thoughts on new technology, how employers can help prevent misuse and what workers must understand.

This value pack includes the all-nylon Voltclaw-12, the industry’s first nonconductive wire control tool, and the nonconductive to 1,000V Voltclaw Multi-Gauge.

Cementex Belt Pouch Tool Combinations feature tools intended for safe use in arc fl ash environments.

PROTO^® is taking its safety obsession to new heights with the PROTO^® SkyHook^™ Tether & Transfer System. This comprehensive system features a patented locking design and short lanyard to keep tools connected at all times. Coupled with a full range of tether-ready tools, it’s the beyond strong solution for safety.

Click here for more information from PROTO Industrial Tools

Keep your jobsite safe and your tools secure with tethering solutions from PROTO^®. Tether- ready tools, lanyards and attachment points with retrofitting capability give you a complete system that minimizes dropped objects and maximizes productivity when working at height. Check out our new lineup and see how “beyond strong” is now “beyond safe.”

Whether cutting through shrink wrap, slicing boxes open or entrusting a lanyard to keep tools safely secured when at height, workers rely on various safety tools and knives every day.

A brewer turns to Siemens for its turnkey Blockchain-based Trusted Traceability Solution to expedite future recall scenarios throughout the brewer’s extensive supply chain.

QR codes and a graphic element are being offered to communicate the status of participants in TPP and LAAF and to promote awareness of the programs.

While we hope the COVID-19 pandemic is fading into the background, we still need to be concerned with labor shortages, transportation interruptions, political issues, weather extremes, and other peripheral circumstances that can still break critical links in the supply chain.

New remote service tools and robust asset management platforms enable food and beverage companies to envision AI-based strategies and facilitate product innovation across the enterprise.

An international student that goes to my local church has asked for my help to find her an affordable flight home for Christmas. Closest airport is BUF and destination is LUN. Depart: 12/16 - 12/22 Return: 1/16 - 1/18 Price is the sole...

The post National Call for Tender: Mental health and psychosocial support frame and tools (Due by 17 Oct) was curated by information for practice.

We are looking for an enthusiastic software developer with understanding of Java or modern C++, to join the Arm Mobile Studio team.

The role involves collaborating with highly motivated developers from different backgrounds, and customers throughout the world, to craft the next generation of our performance analysis tools for Arm CPUs and Mali GPUs. As part of this team, you would help create new features, maintain existing ones, and support the engineering infrastructure for build, test, and continuous integration. We also help to support both internal and external customers, and contribute to our developer documentation, developer website, and community forums.

We are growing the team to help deliver features that support the full breadth of Arm's product portfolio. Our tools are used to optimize the latest smart cars, drones, mobile games, and machine learning applications, your ideas will make a difference and help to bring world-beating products to market.

Please note this is a Fixed Term Contract ending Sept 2021

We are looking for a highly skilled, technically capable senior software engineer to join the team of Arm Forge at Warwick. You will be passionate about making a difference through building great quality products.

As an experienced developer, you’ll have a methodical approach to debugging and performance analysis and understand how developers will use our tools to achieve their objectives. Working as part of a team of C++ software engineers based in Warwick you will help to develop the Arm Forge Debug and Profiling tools.

Arm Forge is used by developers to increase software performance or fix software bugs from single Linux servers right up to the largest supercomputer on the planet.  Our tools span a wide range of use cases; from C/C++/Python developers writing multithreaded server applications or ML and data analysis applications, to C/C++/Fortran/Python HPC developers scaling to millions of cores.

To learn more about our group and the products please check https://developer.arm.com/hpc.

Main Duties

We are looking for a highly skilled and motivated senior software engineer who is passionate about producing quality valuable software to join our elite team based in Warwick.

• Responsible for developing quality functionality on schedule, including specification, design, development, documentation and test.
• Drive forward major features or improvements and increase quality into the product.
• Expected to integrate with existing ARM process and infrastructure where possible and use your experience to introduce new processes where required.

Customer satisfaction is crucial for any business, and a route optimizer can help you enhance it. By optimizing your driving routes, you can provide more accurate estimated arrival times to your customers. This allows them to plan their day accordingly and reduces the chances of missed or delayed appointments. Moreover, by optimizing your routes and minimizing the time spent on the road, you can offer faster and more reliable service to your customers. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and positive reviews, boosting your business reputation.

To fully exploit ultra-short X-ray pulse durations routinely available at X-ray free-electron lasers to follow out-of-equilibrium dynamics, inherent arrival time fluctuations of the X-ray pulse with an external perturbing laser pulse need to be measured. In this work, two methods of arrival time measurement were compared to measure the arrival time jitter of hard X-ray pulses. The methods were photoelectron streaking by a THz field and a transient refractive index change of a semiconductor. The methods were validated by shot-to-shot correction of a pump–probe transient reflectivity measurement. An ultimate shot-to-shot full width at half-maximum error between the devices of 19.2 ± 0.1 fs was measured.

A group of three deep-learning tools, referred to collectively as CHiMP (Crystal Hits in My Plate), were created for analysis of micrographs of protein crystallization experiments at the Diamond Light Source (DLS) synchrotron, UK. The first tool, a classification network, assigns images into categories relating to experimental outcomes. The other two tools are networks that perform both object detection and instance segmentation, resulting in masks of individual crystals in the first case and masks of crystallization droplets in addition to crystals in the second case, allowing the positions and sizes of these entities to be recorded. The creation of these tools used transfer learning, where weights from a pre-trained deep-learning network were used as a starting point and repurposed by further training on a relatively small set of data. Two of the tools are now integrated at the VMXi macromolecular crystallography beamline at DLS, where they have the potential to absolve the need for any user input, both for monitoring crystallization experiments and for triggering in situ data collections. The third is being integrated into the XChem fragment-based drug-discovery screening platform, also at DLS, to allow the automatic targeting of acoustic compound dispensing into crystallization droplets.

Online courses and innovative teaching methods have triggered a trend in education, where the integration of multimedia, online resources and interactive tools is reshaping the view of both virtual and traditional classrooms. The use of interactive tools extends beyond the boundaries of the physical classroom, offering students the flexibility to access materials at their own speed and convenience and enhancing their learning experience. In the field of crystallography, there are a wide variety of free online resources such as web pages, interactive applets, databases and programs that can be implemented in fundamental crystallography courses for different academic levels and curricula. This paper discusses a variety of resources that can be helpful for crystallographic symmetry handling and visualization, discussing four specific resources in detail: the Bilbao Crystallographic Server, the Cambridge Structural Database, VESTA and Jmol. The utility of these resources is explained and shown by several illustrative examples.