Michal Torma

• Heuvel-Greve, Martine J. van den; Polling, Marcel; Groot, G. Arjen de; Kodde, Linda; Mulder, Ingeborg M. & Verdaat, Hans [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2026). Tracking biodiversity in changing Arctic waters: insights from eDNA metabarcoding in Svalbard. Polar Biology. ISSN 0722-4060. 49. doi: 10.1007/s00300-026-03488-9. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Monitoring biodiversity patterns and their changes in Arctic coastal ecosystems is critical under ongoing climate change. However, common current approaches require high effort and expertise and this in turn limits the spatial and temporal scale of these monitoring efforts. Here, we investigated both the fish and the marine invertebrate communities across Svalbard using a multi-marker environmental DNA metabarcoding approach. We collected and analysed marine water, sediment and zooplankton filtered from marine water from sites influenced by the warm West Spitsbergen Current and the cold East Spitsbergen Current. Following metabarcoding amplification using mitochondrial COI, 12S, 16S and nuclear 18S markers and high-throughput sequencing, we retrieved an extensive overview of Svalbard marine biodiversity. Water, sediment and especially zooplankton samples collected across Svalbard revealed spatial differences in community composition, with significantly distinct assemblages in the northwest and southeast of Svalbard. We identified potential bioindicator species for use in rapid assessment of impacts of marine temperature increase and confirmed observed patterns of ongoing shifts in community structure as a response to changes in dominant water masses. Overall, our findings show that species composition depending on fine-scale climate variation of Arctic waters can be effectively studied and monitored using environmental DNA. These insights can help us understand current and evolving climate-driven changes.

• Tjessem, Ingrid Vesterdal; Horvath, Peter; Volden, Inger Kristine Følling; Naas, Adam Eindride; Torma, Michal & Bryn, Anders (2025). A century of treeline and forest line data for Betula pubescens subsp. czerepanovii across high elevations in Norway. Biodiversity Data Journal. ISSN 1314-2836. 13. doi: 10.3897/bdj.13.e160358. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Background The global climate is warming, especially in northern regions due to high-latitude amplification. This high-latitude warming leads to range expansion with advancing tree- and forest-lines (TFLs) in the Northern Hemisphere. However, empirical studies can rarely provide a well-documented elevational expansion rate, especially for timescales longer than 40–50 years. This study provides a unique long-term dataset on TFL dynamics of Betula pubescens subsp. czerepanovii in Norway, based on a combination of resampled historical data (n = 319) and new field registrations (n = 447). Our dataset includes a total of 766 registrations from five counties in Norway. In total, the dataset contains 439 treelines and 327 forest lines, most likely representing the highest recorded TFLs for the region at the given time. For all data, both resampled and new, locality, coordinates, elevation, aspect and spatial uncertainty and the resampling/sampling methods and definitions are provided. The entire material is stored and available for download through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) portal. New information This dataset includes newly-resampled TFLs, based on 57–127-year-old registrations. The entries provide elevational changes, georeferenced localities and potential sites for monitoring climate change effects. The entries enable regional analyses of TFL dynamics on intermediate timescales, including the effect of time lags. The material is available for modelling TFL range shifts along the boreal-alpine ecotone. This dataset most likely provides the highest registered Betula pubescens subsp. czerepanovii locations within their specific regions, thus representing the contemporary ecophysiological range limits for the life-form tree. Additional high-elevation TFL sites and localities have been added to make the material suitable for future remapping and monitoring of climatic TFL dynamics.

• Jeunen, Gert-Jan; Fernandes, Kristen; Dowle, Eddy; Kroos, Gracie C; Mauvisseau, Quentin & Torma, Michal [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2024). tombRaider - improved species and haplotype recovery from metabarcoding data through artefact and pseudogene exclusion. BioRxiv. ISSN 0362-4331. doi: 10.1101/2024.08.23.609468. Full text in Research Archive
• Naas, Adam Eindride; Halvorsen, Rune; Horvath, Peter; Wollan, Anders Kvalvåg; Bratli, Harald & Brynildsrud, Katrine Marie [Show all 16 contributors for this article] (2023). What explains inconsistencies in field-based ecosystem mapping? Applied Vegetation Science. ISSN 1402-2001. 26(1). doi: 10.1111/avsc.12715. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Questions Field-based ecosystem mapping is prone to observer bias, typically resulting in a mismatch between maps made by different mappers, that is, inconsistency. Experimental studies testing the influence of site, mapping scale, and differences in experience level on inconsistency in field-based ecosystem mapping are lacking. Here, we study how inconsistencies in field-based ecosystem maps depend on these factors. Location Iškoras and Guollemuorsuolu, northeastern Norway, and Landsvik and Lygra, western Norway. Methods In a balanced experiment, four sites were field-mapped wall-to-wall to scales 1:5000 and 1:20,000 by 12 mappers, representing three experience levels. Thematic inconsistency was calculated by overlay analysis of map pairs from the same site, mapped to the same scale. We tested for significant differences between sites, scales, and experience-level groups. Principal components analysis was used in an analysis of additional map inconsistencies and their relationships with site, scale and differences in experience level and time consumption were analysed with redundancy analysis. Results On average, thematic inconsistency was 51%. The most important predictor for thematic inconsistency, and for all map inconsistencies, was site. Scale and its interaction with site predicted map inconsistencies, but only the latter were important for thematic inconsistency. The only experience-level group that differed significantly from the mean thematic inconsistency was that of the most experienced mappers, with nine percentage points. Experience had no significant effect on map inconsistency as a whole. Conclusion Thematic inconsistency was high for all but the dominant thematic units, with potentially adverse consequences for mapping ecosystems that are fragmented or have low coverage. Interactions between site and mapping system properties are considered the main reasons why no relationships between scale and thematic inconsistency were observed. More controlled experiments are needed to quantify the effect of other factors on inconsistency in field-based mapping.

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• Tykarski, Piotr; Torma, Michal; Theocharides, Soulaine; Rożek, Katarzyna Wszałek-; Addink, Wouter & Endresen, Dag (2026). AI for specimen labels - final dissemination workshop. doi: https:/www.gbif.no/events/2026/ai-for-specimen-labels---final-dissemination-works.html. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  For participants from previous events and new individuals interested in the use of AI in transcribing specimen labels. We summarize the project's progress, including information about DiSSCo and its annotation infrastructure, as well as the current status of SpLAT - Specimen Label Automated Transcriber. We will also test SpLAT using different LLMs and discuss possible methods of evaluating the tool's results, as well as the future plans and opportunities.

• Chala, Desalegn; Kusch, Erik; Rossi, Tuomas; Juottonen, Heli; Weiland, Claus & Grieb, Jonas [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2025). BioDT uc-CWR: Crop Wild Relative Digital Twin. doi: 10.5281/ZENODO.15696971. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  BioDT: Crop Wild Relative prototype Digital Twin (CWR pDT). The prototype digital twin (pDT) aids in searching and utilising CWR genetic resources. Using the MoDGP (Modelling the Germplasm of Interest) tool, the pDT enables mapping geographic areas where stress-tolerant CWR populations can be found. With its graphical user interface, it offers flexibility in selecting genetic resources from CWR tailored to enhance the resilience of various crops against diverse stress factors.

• Chala, Desalegn; Kusch, Erik; Andrew, Carrie; Torma, Michal; Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah & Kehel, Zakaria [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2024). BioDT Hackathon: Second End-Users Workshop, January 2024. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Three-day hackathon titled Harnessing Digital Twinning for Sustainable Agriculture: Predictive Characterisation and Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives, takes place from January 23rd to 25th, 2024 in Oslo, Norway. The event, promises to unravel the immense potential of digital twinning in revolutionizing global agricultural practices.

• Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah; Torma, Michal; Boer, Hugo de; Meyke, Evgeniy; Schigel, Dmitry & Karimov, Farkhod (2024). GBIF in Central Asia new aspects of development Workshop. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Physical workshop and conference with optional digital participation, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Providing capacity-building on digitization techniques, data publication, and data cleaning, and co-creating Russian language resources. This project aims to enhance data publication and bioinformatics in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

• Torma, Michal & Endresen, Dag (2024). Biodiversity data publication workshop at UiO 17 September 2024. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Natural History Museum MaNa group and Norwegian Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) node invite students, PhDs, postdocs, researchers, and faculty at the University of Oslo and other institutions for a 1-day workshop on Tuesday, 17 September 2024.

• Kongshavn, Katrine; Endresen, Dag; Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah; Bakken, Vidar & Torma, Michal (2023). University Museum of Bergen - Data publication workshop. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Norwegian Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) node and the University Museum of Bergen welcomes you to a 2-day workshop to publish biodiversity data as Darwin Core Archives on March 13-14th, 2023.

• Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah; Frøslev, Tobias Guldberg; Plessis, Morne Du; Torma, Michal; Kamenova, Stefaniya & Braathen, Catherine [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2023). Course on DNA barcode data in BOLD and GBIF - Cape Town, South Africa. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Accelerating biodiversity research through DNA barcodes, collection, and observation data. Regional Training Course for M.Sc. and Ph.D. students with expert trainers and trainers-in-training - Cape Town, South Africa.

• Marsden, Luke; Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah; Torma, Michal & Endresen, Dag (2023). Marine data publishing workshop. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Norwegian Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) node, in collaboration with the Nansen Legacy project, 2-day workshop to help you publish your biodiversity data as Darwin Core Archives! This is a fantastic opportunity to work on your data with the assistance of experts who are involved in developing the Darwin Core standards.

• Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah & Torma, Michal (2023). "Publish First": A Rapid, GPT-4 Based Digitisation System for Small Institutes with Minimal Resources. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (BISS). 7(e112428). doi: 10.3897/biss.7.112428. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  We present a streamlined technical solution ("Publish First") designed to assist smaller, resource-constrained herbaria in rapidly publishing their specimens to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Specimen data from smaller herbaria, particularly those in biodiversity-rich regions of the world, provide a valuable and often unique contribution to the global pool of biodiversity knowledge (Marsico et al. 2020). However, these institutions often face challenges not applicable to larger herbaria, including a lack of staff with technical skills, limited staff hours for digitization work, inadequate financial resources for specialized scanning equipment, cameras, lights, and imaging stands, limited (or no) access to computers and collection management software, and unreliable internet connections. Data-scarce and biodiversity rich countries are also often linguistically diverse (Gorenflo et al. 2012), and staff may not have English skills, which means pre-existing online data publication resources and guides are of limited use. The "Publish First" method we are trialing, addresses several of these issues: it drastically simplifies the publication process so technical skills are not necessary; it minimizes administrative tasks saving time; it uses simple, cheap and easily available hardware; it does not require any specialized software; and the process is so simple that there is little to no need for any written instructions. "Publish first" requires staff to attach QR code labels containing identifiers to herbarium specimen sheets, scan these sheets using a document scanner costing around €300, then drag and drop these files to an S3 bucket (a cloud container that specialises in storing files). Subsequently, these images are automatically processed through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service to extract text, which is then passed on to OpenAI's Generative Pre-Transformer 4 (GPT-4) Application Programming Interface (API), for standardization. The standardized data is integrated into a Darwin Core Archive file that is automatically published through GBIF's Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) (GBIF 2021). The most technically challenging aspect of this project has been the standardization of OCR data to Darwin Core using the GPT-4 API, particularly in crafting precise prompts to address the inherent inconsistency and lack of reliability in these Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite this, GPT-4 outperformed our manual scraping efforts. Our choice of GPT-4 as a model was a naive one: we implemented the workflow on some pre-digitized specimens from previously published Norwegian collections, compared the published data on GBIF with GPT-4's Darwin Core standardized output, and found the results satisfactory. Moving forward, we plan to undertake more rigorous additional research to compare the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of different LLMs as Darwin Core standardization engines. We are also particularly interested in exploring the new "function calling" feature added to the GPT-4 API, as it promises to allow us to retrieve standardized data in a more consistent and structured format. This workflow is currently under trial in Tajikistan, and may possibly be used in Uzbekistan, Armenia and Italy in the near future.

• Bryn, Anders; Horvath, Peter; Volden, Inger Kristine; Stordal, Frode; Torma, Michal & Tjessem, Ingrid Vesterdal [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2023). Citizen science for treeline mapping. Full text in Research Archive
• Bryn, Anders; Brynildsrud, Katrine Marie; Horvath, Peter; Keetz, Lasse Torben; Lieungh, Eva & Naas, Adam Eindride [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2023). “Ground-truth" from field-based ecosystem mapping. Full text in Research Archive
• Marsden, Luke; Endresen, Dag; Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah; Torma, Michal & Altenburger, Andreas (2022). Nansen Legacy - Marine data publishing workshop in Tromsø in September 2022. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Nansen Legacy (AeN) 3-day workshop to publish marine biodiversity data from the AeN project as Darwin Core Archives on September 20-22, 2022. With support from the Norwegian Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) node, and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS, EurOBIS). https://www.gbif.no/events/2022/nansen-legacy-tromso.html

• Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah; Endresen, Dag & Torma, Michal (2022). An Update on Persistent Identifiers in Norwegian Biodiversity Data. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (BISS). doi: 10.3897/biss.6.91585. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are reference keys to pieces of digital information or digital objects (Meadows and Haak 2018). PIDs are long-lasting, trustworthy and ideally globally unique, allowing information to be unambigiously associated with a digital object. This allows, for example, collection objects to be annotated with data (e.g., improved geographic coordinates) from different web services and databases (Page 2008). In 2014, Norway began an initiative to provide all museum specimens at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum (UiO NHM) with PIDs persistent and globally unique identifiers (PIDs) in the form of universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) prefixed by a persistent uniform resource locator (PURL) (Endresen and Svindseth 2014). This poster provides an update of progress made in this endeavor, and details the technical set up and workflow, as well as problems encountered and reflections on the process. So far, roughly 40% of UiO NHM's collections have PIDs entered in the Darwin Core materialSampleID field for the collections management system. The main technical problem has been in configuring the PURL service to set up redirects correctly. In the future, we plan to migrate from PURLs to the Handle system which provides identifiers for digital objects, or to using DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), which are an implementation of the Handle system (Paskin 2017).

• Bryn, Anders; Horvath, Peter; Torma, Michal; Naas, Adam Eindride; Volden, Inger Kristine & Liahjell, Gunnar Thorsen [Show all 10 contributors for this article] (2022). Treeline research at Natural history museum (UiO). Full text in Research Archive
• Endresen, Dag; Russell, Laura Anne; Schigel, Dmitry; Prylutskyi, Oleh; Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah & Torma, Michal [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2022). Four-day program on open biodiversity data publishing and high-level data paper publishing, online for Ukraine in August 2022. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Regional training course for M.Sc. and Ph.D. students from Ukraine with expert trainers and trainers-in-training, Tuesday 16 to Friday 19 August 2022. Plus preparatory assignments from 1st to 12th August, and post-course assignments from 22nd August to 3rd September. Successful attendees will be issued a certificate of attendance corresponding to 2 ECTS and a digital GBIF Certified Trainer badge. This training model has been tested in the Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) programme and is adapted to BioDATA needs. The course is designed for 16-20 participants. All applicants must submit a motivation letter as part of their registration. Lectures will be in English with teaching materials available both in English and Russian languages, with the support of Ukrainian-speaking mentors. https://www.nhm.uio.no/english/research/projects/biodata/activities/2022-ukraine.html

• Endresen, Dag; Russell, Laura Anne; Schigel, Dmitry; Boer, Hugo de; Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah & Torma, Michal [Show all 10 contributors for this article] (2022). Five-day program curriculum on open biodiversity data publishing, including excursion and bioblitz in Dilijan, Armenia in May 2022. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Regional Training course for M.Sc. and Ph.D. students with expert trainers and trainers-in-training - Dilijan, Armenia (5 days), 1 to 5 May 2022. Successful attendees will be issued a certificate of attendance corresponding to 2 ECTS and a digital GBIF Certified Trainer badge. This training model has been tested in the Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) programme and is adapted to BioDATA needs. The course is designed for 16-20 participants. All applicants must submit a motivation letter as part of their registration. The lectures will be in English (with some teaching materials available in Armenian). https://www.nhm.uio.no/english/research/projects/biodata/activities/2022-armenia.html

• Johaadien, Rukaya Sarah; Torma, Michal; Rindal, Eirik & Barotov, Samariddin (2022). CESP mentoring - data publication and digitisation course for Tajikistan September 2022. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  GBIF data mobilization and publication course for the Tajikistan GBIF Node at the Institute of Botany, Plant Physiology and Genetics, Tajikistan National Academy of Sciences, Armenia (3 days). https://www.gbif.no/events/2022/cesp-tajikistan.html https://www.gbif.org/project/CESP2022-001/

• Torma, Michal (2020). NiN mapping in Northern Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Bryn, Anders; Naas, Adam Eindride; Horvath, Peter; Stordal, Frode; Torma, Michal & Volden, Inger Kristine [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2002). Tree- and forest line dynamics in Norway – causes, consequences and monitoring. Full text in Research Archive

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