Nyheter

Togo becomes the GBIF network’s newest Voting Participant

Publicerat av GBIF.org --

Image 

Togo has changed its status in the GBIF network from Associate to Voting Participant. This update gives representatives to the West African country a direct role in GBIF's governance and contributes financially to the global open-access enterprise. The number of full Voting Participants now stands at 38—the most in GBIF’s history.

The Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lomé hosts GBIF Togo, the national ‘node’ or coordinating unit, which joined the network as an Associate Participant in 2009. Togo’s Ministry for Higher Education and Research provides additional support and guidance.

GBIF Togo received mentoring support through GBIF’s capacity enhancement programme, which enables the transfer of technologies and expertise between the network’s nodes. Its staff collaborated with GBIF France in 2010 to set up the node and begin publishing data. The mentoring project resulted in making specimen records from the country’s herbarium available through GBIF.org.

In 2013, GBIF Togo received additional mentoring, this time from GBIF Belgium, with the goal of improving its data publishing capacity, leading to the publication of checklists related to leguminous plants, algae and West African mushrooms.

As of February 2015, GBIF.org provides nearly 37,000 occurrence records of species in Togo, contributed by 22 countries.

 

Photo: Grottes de Nok, Togo. By Panoramas. CC BY-ND 2.0

Stockholm Phylogenomics Group – Talk at NRM 24 March: SUPERSMART

Publicerat av Johan Nylander --

Stockholm Phylogenomics Group announces – Upcoming talk at the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, Stockholm, March 24.

Speakers: Alexandre Antonelli (University of Gothenburg),
Hannes Hettling and Rutger Vos (Naturalis Biodiversity Center,
the Netherlands)

Title: SUPERSMART: Ecology and evolution in the era of big data

Time: March 24 at 15:00-16:00

Venue: Room 525, Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, Stockholm

Host: Fredrik Ronquist

Abstract: Rapidly growing biological data volumes – including
molecular sequences and fossil records – hold an unprecedented
potential to reveal how evolutionary processes generate and
maintain biodiversity. However, most studies integrating these
data use an idiosyncratic step-by-step approach for the
reconstruction of time-calibrated phylogenies. We will present a
novel conceptual framework, termed SUPERSMART (Self-Updating
Platform for Estimating Rates of Speciation and Migration, Ages,
and Relationships of Taxa), and present our proof of concept for
dealing with the moving targets of biodiversity research. This
framework reconstructs dated phylogenies based on the assembly
of molecular and genomic datasets. The data handled for each step
are continuously updated as databases accumulate new records. We
believe that this emerging framework will provide an invaluable
tool for a wide range of hypothesis-driven research questions in
systematics and evolution. For more information please see

http://www.supersmart-project.org.

Researcher in Evolutionary Biology (Plant Speciation)

Publicerat av Magnus Popp --

A 3-year research position is available at the Natural History Museum (NHM), University of Oslo. The position is connected to the project SpArc (High speciation rates in Arctic plants: genomic mechanisms and relevance to the latitudinal diversity gradient), funded by the Research Council of Norway for four years from 2015.

More info at: http://uio.easycruit.com/vacancy/1336993/71922?iso=no

2015 GBIF Capacity Enhancement Programme: call for proposals

Publicerat av GBIF.org --

The GBIF Secretariat is now accepting proposals for funding under the 2015 Capacity Enhancement Programme, which provides GBIF Participants with co-funding for collaborative, capacity transfer projects.

Applicants must submit short concept notes for the first stage of the programme’s two-stage process by 3 March 2015. Individual projects can receive a maximum of €25,000 for a combination of mentoring activities, regional training support, GBIF advocacy actions, documentation and capacity needs assessments. Now in its second year, the programme receives its €60,000 allocation from GBIF core funds,

The 2015 call for proposals document and a template for preparing project concept notes provide details.

For further information, please contact the Secretariat.