NLBIF searches candidates for GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Prize and GBIF Young Researchers Award 2013

The Ebbe Nielsen Prize is an annually rewarded prize for talented researchers in the field of biodiversity informatics. The winner of the Ebbe Nielsen Prize receives a grant of 30.000 euro for his or her research and will join the honorable list of GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Prize winners at a ceremony during the yearly meeting of the GBIF Governing Board. For more information please see the specific section of the GBIF website. The GBIF deadline for nominations is March 15 2013, applications need to be submitted to the NLBIF secretariat before March 12th. For more info on the nomination procedure please do not hesitate to contact the NLBIF coordinator.

NLBIF also searches talented PhD and MSc students performing original and groundbreaking research in the field of biodiversity informatics. Students demonstrating the possibilities of online (GBIF) Biodiversity data in combination with innovative ICT applications to tackle and solve scientific and societal problems, can be nominated for the GBIF "Young Researchers Award". This stimulation prize, one for PhD students and one for MSc students, will enable the selected nominees to invest 4000 euro in their own research. For more information please visit the YRA section of the GBIF website. Applications from the Netherlands will run through the NLBIF secretariat. The Netherlands can nominate only two candidates, in case of several applications an ad hoc commission will make a selection. Deadline for nominations is March 12th 2013, NLBIF secretariat. Interested students should contact the NLBIF coordinator well in advance.

The ultimate tool for publishing biodiversity data online  

After several months of trials NLBIF launches the "Integrated Publishing Toolkit" (IPT), a tool developed by GBIF for publishing collection, research and observational data, meta data and species checklists. This tool allows the user-friendly publication of data in the public domain and is based on the international biodiversity data standards DarwinCore (DwC) and the Ecological Metadata Language (EML). Data are directly accessible through the IPT and indirectly through the data portal of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Dutch biodiversity data-owners can freely publish their data through the NLBIF IPT or consider to install their own IPT, obviously with the support of NLBIF. More info on this tool is available at the  GBIF IPT pages, see the NLBIF IPT for a live impression. Please contact the NLBIF coordinator for more info on installing and using the IPT and sharing your data with the rest of the world.

Aligning standards will help share information on biodiversity yet to be discovered

Copenhagen, Denmark – Important progress has been achieved towards including genomic-level information in the data made freely available through GBIF.

Successful alignment of informatics standards for recording species occurrences and gene-sequence descriptions has opened up new possibilities for integrating the different types of data.

The mapping of three standards was completed at a GBIF-led workshop in Oxford, United Kingdom bringing together experts from Europe, the United States, China and Japan.

A testing programme will shortly begin to bring data from several repositories of genomic information into the GBIF network, using adaptations of the Darwin Core (DwC) standard for sharing biodiversity data.

The developments will fulfill an objective of GBIF’s Strategic Plan 2012-16, which calls for the network to accommodate new types of data, in order to give access to information on the estimated 90 per cent of the world’s biodiversity still to be discovered – the currency of which will largely be genomic information. 

For more information see GBIF news on website:

http://www.gbif.org/communications/news-and-events/showsingle/article/genomic-data-in-gbif-moves-a-step-closer/

The Ebbe Nielsen Prize is an annually rewarded prize for talented researchers in the field of biodiversity informatics. The winner of the Ebbe Nielsen Prize receives a grant of 30.000 euro for his or her research and will join the honorable list of GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Prize winners at a ceremony during the yearly meeting of the GBIF Governing Board. For more information please download the GBIF ENP info sheet . Deadline for nominations is March 15 2012. For more info on the nomination procedure please do not hesitate to contact the  NLBIF coördinator.

NLBIF also searches talented PhD and MSc students performing original and groundbreaking research in the field of biodiversity informatics. Students demonstrating the possibilities of online (GBIF) Biodiversity data in combination with innovative ICT applications to tackle and solve scientific and societal problems, can be nominated for the GBIF "Young Researchers Award". This stimulation prize, one for PhD. students and one for MSc. students, will enable the selected nominees to invest 4000 euro in their own research. For more information please download the  GBIF YRA info sheet with instructions and guidelines for nominees. Applications from the Netherlands will run through the NLBIF secretariat. The Netherlands can nominate only two candidates, in case of several applications an ad hoc commission will make a selection. GBIF deadline for nominations is March 15 2012, interested students should contact the  NLBIF coördinator  well in advance.

A joint University of Amsterdam, NLBIF and LifeWatch Summer Course on Geo-ecological Data Analysis is now open for (pre)registration.

The increasing availability of high quality occurrence and abundance data at the species level accompanied by many environmental data layers has boosted the developments in species distribution modeling (SDM). As a result, there are nowadays numerous data-driven modeling tools available for enhancing understanding of ecological systems or generating predictions, which has however not made life easier for most young researchers. This course aims at introducing the students to the fundamental research questions, to important model assumptions and to several basic data analysis steps. In addition, the most important techniques are introduced to make geo-ecological data accessible in a database and analyze it with appropriate modeling procedures. This course uses the book 'Mapping species distributions - Spatial inference and prediction' by Janet Franklin (2009, Cambridge university press) as a theoretical basis. The focus is on selecting data, understanding data processing and analysis steps for diverse taxa and work-flows for interpreting model results, rather than computer skills. Notwithstanding this emphasis, a number of software tools are used and explained, such as GIS software to process environmental and species occurrence data and the R environment for SDM. The course combines short lectures with participant discussions and predominantly hands-on (computer)work. Preferably data and problems brought in by participants will be analyzed, but also extraction and use of data from GBIF will be demonstrated. The course is coordinated by Emiel van Loon (Computational Geo-Ecology, UvA) and Cees Hof (the coordinator of NLBIF) and brings in international expertise in different fields. For details and registration visit the info page and download the registration form. Students and researchers working with GBIF data(sets) are particularly invited to participate.

Dates: 21-24 June 2011, place: Amsterdam.

Deadline for application: 1st of May.

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