Oleksii is a junior researcher at the Department of Animal monitoring and conservation, I. I. Schmalhausen institute of Zoology NAS of Ukraine as well as herpetologist at NGO “Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group” (UNCG). Oleksii is an author of more than 150 scientific works (including, collective monographs, thesis, proceedings, abstracts, 7 articles in Ukrainian scientific journals that are included in the “List of professional scientific publishers of Ukraine” and 28 articles published in international peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus and WoS. More detailed information can be found on his scientific profiles: Researchgate, ORCID, Google Scholar), Scopus.

Since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Oleksii has been helping other scientists, environmentalists and other enthusiasts to save the data on registrations of biodiversity, which can be destroyed by the war. Thanks to him, more than 350000 of such records were saved, digitalized and published, therefore becoming available for use of scientific community worldwide. The importance of this work is in the urgent need to save the results of long years of work in order to assess and understand the impact of war on native biodiversity in future.

“The main objective of the project is to collect, digitalize and publish data on biodiversity (records of various representatives of fauna and flora) from scientists and environmentalists in any way affected by the war in order to save the data and make it available for global scientific community. The data published on a GBIF platform will be automatically available for all interested parties. Through webinars announced on our social media we will popularize the idea among scientific youth. The project will cover entire territory of Ukraine with the management core in Kyiv. Data on Ukrainian biodiversity, that are important for assessment the impact of war on nature, will be stored in an online cloud storage of GBIF server making them accessible for all interested parties and relative research.” – Oleksii Marushchak