Technical Analyst - Environmental (Spatial Data and Planning) - Retainer

UNOPS is seeking the support of a Technical Analyst - Environmental (Spatial Data and Planning) to advance the Global Programme on Nature for Development’s work to support governments to use spatial data and systematic conservation planning in their efforts to plan, implement, monitor, and report on their commitments to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the other Rio Conventions, and the nature-based elements of the UN 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development. The goal of the assignment is to provide GIS and coding support, contribute to the development of technical documents, guidance materials, and other related resources for the UN Biodiversity Lab and a variety of projects and initiatives that bring together the world’s governments, UN agencies, and leading scientists to develop and implement approaches around the globe to identify where nature-based actions to protect, manage, or restore biodiversity and ecosystems can more effectively and efficiently meet national commitments and priorities for biodiversity, climate, and sustainable development.

Under the supervision of the Senior Technical Manager the duties and responsibilities include:
Data Management

• Review data on UN Biodiversity Lab (UNBL) against UNBL data standards.
• Maintain an inventory of current data that is available in the UNBL platform.
• Provide recommendations to project leads on how frequently each dataset needs to be updated and develop/implement a timeline for data updates.
• Assess Monitoring Framework of the UN Biodiversity Convention’s Global Biodiversity Framework to identify global reference data indicated for calculation of headline, component, and complementary indicators.
• Support the development of any necessary data sharing agreements with data providers.
• Gather, process, and uploading datasets, or correct data access parameters and configurations , into the UN Biodiversity Lab platform, including correct available metadata.
• Conduct GIS processing needed to render data into the formats required by the UN Biodiversity Lab platform. These may include, but are not limited to, data projection issues and web optimization of data.
• Support the project team to carry out geoprocessing and analyses of data layers to create data stacks needed for analyses to identify ELSAs, combining global and national data as relevant.
• Create ELSA collections in countries’ private workspaces on the UN Biodiversity Lab and upload data for ELSA countries.
• Support the developers with beta testing of new UN Biodiversity Lab features and functions.
• Monitor requests from UN Biodiversity Lab users, including data, success stories and feedback submission forms.
• Support the policy team in data gathering, cleaning, and analysis for projects supporting countries in their commitments to the UN Biodiversity Convention.

• As directed by spatial planner, assist in the development of scripts and general code using the R programming language, as well as implementation of analysis needed to scale up ELSA analyses for more countries.
• Support in the development of scripts and general code using Python programming language to support the policy analysis work related to national work under the UN Biodiversity Convention.

• Attend team meetings as necessary via Zoom or other online services.
• Provide general administrative support including taking meeting minutes, setting up meetings, etc. 
• Support project leads in task and product management by creating, updating, and tracking team tasks.

• Draft relevant capacity building materials, including guidance documents, presentations for live trainings, and lab exercises. 
• Support training and virtual capacity building events UN Biodiversity Lab and ELSA, including providing advice and input on data-related questions.
• Support knowledge management efforts and gathering and dissemination of best practices, including data analysis.
• Support with UN Biodiversity Lab communications efforts, including drafting user stories and impact information.
• Coordinate translations to five languages (English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish).

Information on Working Arrangements

• The contractor will work remotely.
• The contractor will be given access to relevant information necessary for the execution of the tasks under this assignment.
• Given the global consultations to be undertaken during this assignment, the contractor is expected to be reasonably flexible with his/her availability for such consultations taking into consideration different time zones.

The contractor will be supervised by the Senior Technical Manager of the Global Programme on Nature for Development, and the contractor and supervisor will determine progress and next step in mutual communication.