MEDIN Webinar Series 2025: Webinar 4 - Making Marine Data Count: Archiving Biodiversity Data with the UK Data Archive for Marine Species and Habitats (DASSH) and Citing with DOIs

This webinar series is hosted by the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN), a UK initiative dedicated to improving access to high-quality marine data. MEDIN works with organisations across sectors to promote best practices in marine data management, ensuring data is discoverable, accessible, and reusable for the long term.

Throughout the year, once per month, this series will feature one-hour online sessions led by expert guest speakers, each focusing on specialised topics not typically covered in MEDIN’s regular free online workshops. These webinars are designed to support better data stewardship and highlight emerging tools, standards, and approaches in marine data.

Sessions will be recorded and made available on the MEDIN YouTube channel, creating a lasting resource for the marine data community.

Whether you are new to marine data management or have years of experience, and no matter which sector you work in, these sessions are designed to be inclusive, informative, and accessible to all who are interested in improving the way marine data is managed and shared.

Webinar 4 - Making Marine Data Count: Archiving Biodiversity Data with the UK Data Archive for Marine Species and Habitats (DASSH) and Citing with DOIs

• Archiving and Publishing Marine Biodiversity Data with DASSH: Tools, Standards, and Processes - Chloe Figueroa Ashforth

  DASSH (the UK Archive for Marine Species and Habitats Data and UK Node of OBIS) is the MEDIN Data Archive Centre (DAC) for marine biodiversity data, providing tools and services to support the archiving, management and publication of long-term marine biodiversity data in standardised formats. Data are published and made discoverable on our DASSH mapper and on various data aggregators’ portals such as OBIS, EMODnet, and NBN Atlas, with metadata for all datasets available on the MEDIN Discovery Metadata portal.

  This webinar will explain DASSH’s submission process for marine biodiversity data, from the initial contact with the provider, offering support with data and metadata standardisation, to the final publication of the data following a robust quality assurance process.  We will highlight the tools and services we provide, including data validation tools, the DASSH Mapper, the IPT and the MEDIN Metadata Helpdesk and the processes used to publish high-quality data that is findable, openly accessible, interoperable and reusable.

• Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and Citations: What they are and how MEDIN can support or make use of them - James Ayliffe (BODC – NOC)

  Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are a service used to uniquely distinguish digital objects from others. DOIs provide a persistent permanent link to metadata that self describes the resource, which, in turn can be used to provide citation to resources such as journal articles, physical samples and data. Generating a DOI is a very simple process that can be used to support FAIR (meta)data however, maintaining the principles behind the DOI is a difficult and complex process, especially considering the impacts and use cases that DOIs are intended support. DOIs should support attribution of credit, traceability and transparency, which also creates a tension between the three as technology and use evolves and develops. We wish to discuss what DOIs are, how they work with citation and how they support the scientific method. We hope the session can explore how can MEDIN support and utilise DOIs and citations going forward?