EMODnet is a network of organisations working together to observe the sea, to make the marine data collected freely available and interoperable, to create seamless data layers across sea-basins and to distribute the data and data products through the Internet. The primary aim of EMODnet is to unlock existing but fragmented and hidden marine data and make them accessible for a wide range of users including private bodies, public authorities and researchers.
Francis Strobbe has been working for more than 10 years at the Belgian Marine Data Centre of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) where he was among others involved in supporting, outreach and communication of the EMODnet Data Ingestion and ENVRI-FAIR Projects, and did the communication in an interdisciplinary scientific landscape, bringing knowledge to diverse audiences.
He received his PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at KU Leuven and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Statistics in Ecology (SEEC), the Environment and Conservation at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI).
He has a background on biodiversity and ecology in aquatic habitats. For his PhD, he looked at the ecological speciation driven by predation in the North American damselfly genus Enallagma. He studied the selective environments and the genetic architecture of key species related to two independent habitat shifts. He worked on the creation of the Belgian Species List, which is the online taxonomic backbone of species occurring in Belgium, hosted by RBINS. He also developed the Belgian Bioarchaeological Inventory node, an online instrument to find archaeozoological information of Belgium. During his postdoctoral research he investigated the possibilities for developing biodiversity data analysis pipelines.
For Seascape Belgium, Francis is taking on a senior position at the EMODnet Secretariat as Data and Communication Officer.