Nicky Nicolson

SSI fellow

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

I'm a software developer turned biodiversity informatics researcher: I use collaborative open science practices to build tools, analyse & mobilise natural history specimen data so that we can understand and protect biodiversity.

I've worked at Kew Gardens in London since 1998 - firstly in a series of software development roles, helping researchers and curators manage and mobilise scientific information (effectively a Research Software Engineer role), before transitioning into the research stream where I did a doctorate using our digitised specimen data to identify previously unmanaged data entities (collectors, expeditions etc). I took software development practices with me to manage my doctoral project. My research was applied in the data portal for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility where it now helps researchers navigate between related records. I'm interested in how we use software development practices (revision control, dependency management, build automation, reuse, continuous integration) in managing the research process.

I participated in Open Life Sciences where I developed a prototype toolkit to help scientists use digital resources when collating taxonomic data - "echinopscis: an extensible notebook for open science on specimens". Botany is a particularly collaborative science, with a long history of sharing specimen resources and developing indexing mechanisms (names lists and taxonomies). I'm part of a network of researchers and technologists that share data and expertise, through data and literature mobilisation programmes like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Biodiversity Heritage Library and World Flora Online, and through standards development at Biodiversity Information Standards.