Harper Adams University

2020-2022 (part-time)

For my thesis, I researched the effects of elevation on Orthoptera species richness, community composition and elevational range (Rapoport's rule) in the Parc Natural de l'Alt Pirineu in the Catalan Pyrenees.

University of St. Andrews

2009-2010

My project investigated the relationship between habitat fragmentation in Fife, Scotland, and bird species richness.

Keele University with semester at Brock University, Canada

2006-2009

Dual honours degree with equal credits in maths and astrophysics. My research project used imagery from ground-based telescopes to search for comets by looking for differences in the pixels between the images.

Swiss Polar Institute

2017-2021

My main role was to work with scientists from the 22 projects which took part in the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition to ensure the datasets were well-described in human and machine-readable formats, then made openly available for others to use.

Arctic Century Expedition

Russian Arctic

Aug - Sept 2021

My main tasks were to visualise and check the integrity of the cruise track data, support on-board scientists with data-related queries, helped to maintain an intranet and use a Django application to record samples collected during the expedition.

Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition

Dec 2016 - Apr 2017

I was responsible for ensuring all 30TB of data were safely stored and and the metadata describing the collection of 30,000 samples, was recorded.

British Antarctic Survey

2013-2016

I was the data manager for the Southern Ocean Network of Acoustics (SONA) project, collaborating with researchers to bring together the fisheries acoustic data collected in the Southern Ocean.

British Antarctic Survey

2012-2013

I curated a variety of biological datasets to prepare them for long-term storage and improve their accessibility. Additionally, I prepared loans of specimens from the Antarctic herbarium.

Operation Wallacea

2011 & 2012

I undertook standardised point counts and ringing surveys of birds in Cusuco National Park, Honduras.

2020

£4,000

2009

£6,500

2022-present

Co-secretary

2020-2021

Member

2013-2016

Member

• I have been ringing birds in the UK since 2011 and have a C permit with a mist-net endorsement. I have also participated in specific ringing projects in Honduras and Catalonia.
• Bird surveys including point counts, transect counts on land and at sea.
• Invertebrate surveys for earthworms, transect counts of bees and butterflies and sweep net surveys for Orthoptera.
• Ad-hoc identification of European wildlife and recording in citizen science databases.

• I use Python and R for managing data files, data manipulation and analysis.
• A lot of my work, from programming to writing my thesis (and this website) is done using version control (git, GitHub and GitLab).
• I often use relational databases and SQL to manage and interrogate data. More recently, I have developed simple Django applications for doing this because for me, it really improves the data entry and checking experience.
• My personal laptop runs on Debian and I regularly use the command line and some simple bash scripts for day-to-day tasks.
• I often use Pandoc and markdown for writing long documents. I have dabbled with LaTeX as well.

• English (native), Catalan (fluent), Spanish (fluent), French (intermediate).

• Landwehr, S., Volpi, M., Haumann, F.A., Robinson, C.M., Thurnherr, I., Ferracci, V., Baccarini, A., Thomas, J., Gorodetskaya, I., Tatzelt, C., Henning, S., Modini, R.L., Forrer, H.J., Lin, Y., Cassar, N., Simó, R., Hassler, C., Moallemi, A., Fawcett, S.E., Harris, N., Airs, R., Derkani, M.H., Alberello, A., Toffoli, A., Chen, G., Rodríguez-Ros, P., Zamanillo, M., Cortés-Greus, P., Xue, L., Bolas, C.G., Leonard, K.C., Perez-Cruz, F., Walton, D. and Schmale, J. (2021). Exploring the coupled ocean and atmosphere system with a data science approach applied to observations from the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition, Earth System Dynamics, 12(4), pp. 1295–1369. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1295-2021.

See ORCID

See GitHub

• Thomas, J. (2021). Data management in the field (1.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5531876
• Thomas, J., Landwehr, S., Volpi, M. & Schmale, J. (2019). ACE-DATA: Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition: Delivering Added value To Antarctica (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2587954
• Walton, D.W.H. & Thomas, J. (2018). Cruise Report - Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE) 20th December 2016 - 19th March 2017 (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1443511

• Thomas, J. & Pina Estany, C. SORTEE conference, 2022. Our experience of using Django to manage ecological data. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/G7NWY (oral)
• Thomas, J., Alba, M., Bouillet, E., Novellino, A., Pina Estany, C. & Volpi, M. IMDIS conference, 2021. How to stop re-inventing the wheel: a data management case study. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4597522 (keynote)
• Thomas, J. IMDIS conference, 2021. Open access datasets from the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4596543 (poster)
• Thomas, J. & Pina Estany, C. SCAR open science conference 2018. How, what, where, when: Expedition metadata and data collection. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5657280 (poster)
• Thomas, J. & Schmale, J. SCAR open science conference 2018. ACE-DATA: Delivering Added value To Antarctica. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5657300 (poster)
• Thomas, J., Fielding, S., Tate, A., Cox, M., Kloser, R., Ryan, T., Brehmer, P., Béhagle, N., Skaret, G., Korneliussen, R., O'Driscoll, R., Dunford, A. & Reiss, C. SCAR Open Science Conference 2014. Southern Ocean Network of Acoustics – A circumpolar database of acoustic observations of the mid-trophic level in the Southern Ocean. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29414.63043 (poster)

• Swiss early-career polar researchers, online, 2020 & 2021.

  Thomas, J. (2021). Data management in the field: workshop. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5531869

• Volta a l'Antàrtida: què hem vist, fet i viscut (Catalan). ADENC, Terrassa, Catalonia, 2018.
• Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (English). Frith Manor Primary School, London, UK, 2017.
• Dando la vuelta a la Antártida con software libre (Spanish). Universidad de Cañete, Perú, 2017.
• Expedición ACE - Dando la vueta la Antártida (Spanish). Primary school, Reñaca Alto, Chile, 2017.
• Organised British Antarctic Survey events for the Cambridge Science Festival (evening of presentations, hackathon and small exhibition of instruments and specimens), UK, 2016.
• Organised marine invertebrate activities for the Cambridge Science Festival, UK, 2015.