Nika Gorski

Profile

Responsible for all things data in the CongoFor1.5 project which assesses the changing ecology and carbon balance of the tropical forests of the Congo basin. The data management is conducted using ForestPlots.net, a web-based application for managing, sharing, and analysing forest demographic, biodiversity, soil, and carbon data.

Main duties and responsibilities:

• Co-ordinating with field team leaders to ensure that they have the field sheets they need prior to fieldwork
• Providing one-to-one training to database users from Central Africa, both remotely and for project visitors to Leeds
• Building good relationships with the field teams and data users in Central
• Co-ordinating partners’ data entry, ensuring high data quality is maintained
• Ensuring data received in Leeds is complete, quality assurance of the forest demographic, carbon and biodiversity is complete, and ensure the partners, and PI sign off on the data, and that it is archived in ForestPlots.net
• Producing diagnostic outputs from the individual plot data using ForestPlot.net. to ensure high data quality is maintained during data upload to signing off process, and differing methodologies are appropriately recorded and standardised
• Independently identify any potential problems with the data, analyse the problem, and if necessary, suggest quality control procedures to address them
• Assisting with the data management part of implementing of the CongoFor1.5 project
• Attending CongoFor1.5 and ForestPlots.net meetings
• Assisting the Project Manager to produce quarterly reports for the funder
• As necessary, improving existing training materials and developing new ones (such as user manuals, checklists, hand-outs, definitions, videos and other documentation for database users) to help users to efficiently and effectively utilise the ForestPlots.net database

Qualifications

• MSc Food Security and Development