From Biodiversity Observations to Insights: Hands-On Training by B-Cubed
February 16th, 2026
B-Cubed’s training series will showcase emerging approaches that help make biodiversity data more actionable in practice.
It will feature six live sessions, held on consecutive Fridays at 15:00 CET. Each session will last 1.5 hours, combining a presentation, Q&A, and a hands-on segment where participants try out tools and workflows.
Species Occurrence Cubes
Speakers: Andrew Rodrigues (GBIF) and Lina Estupinan Suarez (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
Overview of GBIF's service for creating and downloading species occurrence cubes from GBIF-mediated data using SQL queries.
Occurrence Cubes and Biological Invasions
Speakers: Maarten Trekels (Meise Botanic Garden) and Sandra MacFadyen (Stellenbosch University)
Details of the Invasibility Cube, integrating trait, environment (and site), and community (species) data to quantify invasion fitness and generate spatial indicators of site invasibility and species/trait invasiveness.
Indicators for National Invasion Reporting
Speaker: Tsungai Alfred Zengeya (South African National Biodiversity Institute)
Focus on the process of compiling reports on biological invasions in South Africa, its evolution over time, and lessons learnt and challenges encountered.
Automating Compositional Dissimilarity and Biodiversity Turnover Mapping with dissmapr
Speaker: Sandra MacFadyen (Stellenbosch University)
Presentation of dissimapr, an open-source R framework that automates compositional dissimilarity and turnover analysis, revealing species-sharing patterns and producing outputs such as turnover heatmaps and bioregional delineations.
Making Use of Colorblind Friendly Graphs
Speaker: Duccio Rocchini (University of Bologna)
Highlighting the importance of coloring maps for daltonic people, reviewing good practices and coding solutions.
The b3verse: An R Package Suite to Process Cubes and Calculate Indicators
Speakers: Shawn Dove (Justus Liebig University), Ward Langeraert and Jasmijn Hillaert (Research Institute for Nature and Forest)
Introduction to the b3verse, a suite of interconnected R packages for retrieving, processing, exploring occurrence cubes, and calculating indicators.