Thibaud Glinez has just joined the COpé team and introduces himself

I joined the Pôle National des Données de Biodiversité (PNDB) team at the UMS PatriNAT (MNHN) as a scientific data and metadata engineer in August 2023. My missions are dedicated to the IA-Biodiv Challenge. My role is to make the metadata sheets produced by the three participating consortia available online, in line with the quality criteria set by us.

The challenge of the Challenge is to get AI researchers to collaborate with ecology researchers, fields which still have a lot to learn from each other.

My other task is to ensure that the PNDB metadata catalog of all biodiversity-related scientific articles is populated according to the required quality criteria. The aim is to make French biodiversity data produced by research available as open data for direct download, with a view to FAIRization.

Before the PNDB, I did…

• A bachelor’s degree in biology and ecology from the University of Nantes, with a strong commitment to the various naturalist associations on campus.
• A Master’s degree in Systematics, Evolution and Paleontology from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris in 2022, with internships focusing on the phylogeny of Latin American Brentidae beetles. It was during this course that I developed my interest in statistics and data.
• A one-year civic service in Guadeloupe for the Direction de l’Alimentation, de l’Agriculture et de la Forêt (Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty) as an R software data-scientist. My mission was to valorize data from the 2010 and 2020 agricultural census, in the form of thematic Rmarkdown sheets (e.g.: key figures for sugarcane farms in 2010 and 2020).

If I were a sea animal, I would be…

A Caribbean trumpetfish (Aulostomus maculatus)! This is a very atypical fish, with its elongated, seahorse-like shape typical of the Syngnathiformes. It’s a species I’ve had the pleasure of observing on numerous occasions during my civic service in Guadeloupe, and which continues to fascinate me as much for its apparent clumsiness and inability to move in the water as for its astonishing ability to camouflage itself in seagrass beds.