Hannu Saarenmaa - Personal Information
Hannu Saarenmaa is the Deputy Director for Informatics of the GBIF since August 2002.
Born in 1954 in Lappeenranta, Finland, he conducted his studies at the College of Forestry and Agriculture of the University of Helsinki and received his Ph.D. there in 1985 in Applied Zoology. Hannu has about 190 publications, majority of which are at the intersection of information technology and ecological sciences and for dissemination of research results.
Hannu worked at the Finnish Forest Research Institute between 1978 and 1994
holding various positions, including Research Scientist in entomology in Lapland,
Director of the Rovaniemi Research Station, and Head of the Information Systems Unit.
His research included mathematical modelling of bark beetle population dynamics,
knowledge engineering applications for forest health management,
multimedia expert systems for forest pest diagnosis,
and entomological observation databases.
He also spent a post-doctoral year at the Texas A&M University studying artificial intelligence,
and was a Visiting Scientist with Forestry Canada working on GIS.
In 1994-1995 Hannu was affiliated with the European Forest Institute and acted as the Professor of Forest Protection with the University of Joensuu. During that time Hannu established the BIN21 node in Finland.
In 1995 Hannu moved to Copenhagen to became the Project Manager for Information Technology at the European Environment Agency. His responsibilities included overall information infrastructure development for the EEA and for EIONET, the European Environment Information and Observation Network that connects environment ministries and agencies in all EU and accession countries. Hannu was also liaison with the European Commission's IDA programme, CIRCA technical committee, and several information society activities. He was also co-managing the European Community Clearing-House Mechanism and responsible of portal technology development.
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At GBIF he is responsible for the overall strategy, planning, budget, and integration of the informatics aspects of GBIF, including distributed services, tooling and technical support to GBIF Participants and Nodes. With the help of the other ICT staff, he manages the operation of the GBIF information system, including security, performance, and availability, and all aspects of user support, policies, procedures, documentation, and ICT training.
Hannu has been an avid Lepidopterologist since 1966. His collection database today covers over 40 000 records and 300 000 observed specimens.
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