[Science news] - 2020 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge

This 20/10/2020 took place the award ceremony for the 2020 edition of the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, which honours the memory of Dr. Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, an inspiring leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics and one of the main founders of the GBIF - Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an international network that aims to provide open access to data on all life on Earth to everyone everywhere.

The first prize was awarded to a multinational team led by Ian Ondo, Research Assistant at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for the 'ShinyBIOMOD' application, which provides a user-friendly interface that facilitates the creation of species distribution models and guides the user step by step through the modelling process.

The two runners-up prizes went to two researchers from Meise Botanic Garden: Maarten Trekels, who, with his contribution of a digital workbook linking scientific names of organisms to type specimens, automates the process of gathering the material needed for botanical taxonomic reviews; and Quentin Groom, who prepared InteractIAS, a tool that combines and visualises interactions between species and occurrence data to support risk assessments by national experts on invasive species.

Meise Botanic Garden is very honoured by the awards that reward the research work of two of its brilliant scientists. There is no doubt that these innovative tools making biodiversity data freely available will provide valuable services to scientists, computer scientists, data modellers, cartographers and other experts working in the field of biodiversity.

More info : GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge