Nyheter

An expert jury has selected six highly innovative finalists from among 23 submissions received for the inaugural GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, inviting their creators to compete for €25,000 during the innovation prize’s second and final round.

The six finalists reflect a wide range of uses of open-access biodiversity data from the GBIF network. They range from browser-based insights on dataset quality to regional bird and frog soundscapes, and from a web application that provides interactive predictive modelling to social media-powered biodiversity assessments,

The winners (in alphabetical order) are:

• #myGBIF, created by Tom August (United Kingdom)
• BioGUID.org, created by Richard Pyle (United States)
• ecoSpace, created by Miguel Porto (Portugal)
• GBIF dataset metrics, created by Peter Desmet, Bart Aelterman & Nicolas Noé (Belgium)
• GBIF Soundscape, created by Ben Raymond & Peter Neish (Australia)
• Wallace, created by Robert P. Anderson, Matthew Aiello-Lammens, Bob Muscarella, Bruno Vilela & Jamie Kass (United States, Denmark and Spain)

Three teams and three individuals located in seven countries are responsible creating the six finalists (profiled briefly below). These entries vary widely in geographic scale, analytics and media integration, and all competition entries are available on the Challenge pages on ChallengePost.

“The creativity and ambition displayed by the finalists is inspiring’, said Roderic Page, chair of the Challenge jury and the GBIF Science Committee, who introduced the Challenge at GBIF’s 2014 Science Symposium in October.

“My biggest hope for the Challenge was that the biodiversity community would respond with innovative—even unexpected—entries,” Page said. “My expectations have been exceeded, and the Jury is eager to see what the finalists can achieve between now and the final round of judging.”

The six finalists, each of whom will receive a €1,000 initial prize, now receive an invitation to further refine their submissions while competing for €25,000 in prizes during round two of the Challenge. The first- and second-place winners—who will receive €20,000 and €5,000, respectively—will be announced at the GBIF Governing Board meeting (GB22) in Madagascar in October 2015.

A new fund aims to supplement existing activities of GBIF to support the needs of researchers and policymakers in Asia through mobilization and use of biodiversity data.

The Biodiversity Information Fund for Asia (BIFA) is the outcome of a contribution to GBIF supplementary funds of more than €156,000 from the Japanese government, earmarked for activities in the Asia region.

Allocations from the fund may support the following broad areas of activity:

• Partial support for a meeting of the regional subcommittee for Asia of the GBIF Participant Node Managers Committee
• Support for activities aimed at enhancing biodiversity knowledge at the regional level—for example, generating species checklists—based on priorities agreed by GBIF nodes in Asia
• Support for capacity-related activities in Asia, such as mentoring and training workshops
• Support for GBIF-related activities potentially contributing to the work of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), in particular the upcoming regional assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services for Asia and the Pacific

A steering committee comprised of representatives from the Ministry of the Environment, Goverment of Japan, the Asia regional group of GBIF nodes, and the GBIF Secretariat will determine the use of the fund within these areas. More information on the allocation of funds from BIFA will be available on GBIF.org in the coming months.

“The establishment of this new fund demonstrates the commitment of the government of Japan to support the mission of GBIF in Asia,” said Donald Hobern, GBIF Executive Secretary. “We hope and expect that the activities supported by BIFA will add significantly to the ability of Asian researchers and decision-makers to access the data required for better understanding and management of the region’s biodiversity.”

The GBIF Secretariat has published version 2.2 of its Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), a free open-source software tool for publishing and sharing biodiversity data. The new version supports consistent, traceable attribution of GBIF-mediated data and downloads, streamlines how publishers define appropriate uses of their data, and improves data quality control.

IPT v2.2 introduces the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs) for datasets, which gives users a stable, easy-to-use model for citing data sources. This approach also improves publishers’ ability to track how and where users apply their data, in both research and web applications. Updates to GBIF.org also support this new citation model,by displaying DOIs both for datasets and for user downloads. Since early February, GBIF has issued DOIs for all newly published datasets (example 1), and GBIF.org now recognizes and displays publisher-assigned DOIs for existing datasets (example 2).

User downloads also now receive GBIF-issued DOIs. This approach significantly simplifies references to any and all datasets represented in user-defined search results, even complex ones comprising occurrences from many different datasets.

The new IPT release also introduces standardized machine-readable data licenses, emphasizing GBIF’s commitment to open access.

Publishers upgrading to IPT v2.2 will have to choose to share new datasets under one of three Creative Commons licenses: CC0, CC BY or CC BY-NC. Publishers who wish to keep non-CC license conditions can continue to publish data using the previous version of the IPT, and the Secretariat will continue to welcome feedback on their concerns about the new licensing options.

These licences provide a consistent way for publishers to define appropriate uses of their data. GBIF will encourage them to adopt the least restrictive terms possible to encourage the widest use and application of their data. This development represents the culmination of an extensive community-driven consultation process and implements recent decisions by the GBIF governing board.

Finally, IPT v2.2 introduces stricter quality control around the Darwin Core standard’s basis of record. As a result, the software will alert publishers when data records fail to distinguish the specific nature of the occurrences, such as specimens, literature citations and observations.

Work is already underway for IPT v2.3, which will introduce support for publishing sample-based datasets and displaying through GBIF.org.