GBits

no. 34 May 2013

SCIENCE AND POLICY � � � � � � 2
Young Researchers Award winners announced

free and open access to biodiversity data

Think bigger, GBIF prize
winner urges biologists
A scientist from Portugal designing large-scale experiments
to uncover the processes behind patterns of species
distribution is the 2013 winner of the prestigious Ebbe
Nielsen Prize, awarded annually by GBIF.
Miguel Bastos Araújo will use the €30,000 prize towards
developing an ‘Ecotron’ experimental facility to test
predictions for how environmental change will affectthe combination of species found in different locations –helping to inform conservation decisions.
Araújo is a research scientist
at the Spanish ResearchCouncil’s National Museum of
Natural Sciences, and visiting
professor at the Universityof Évora, Portugal, and the
University of Copenhagen,Denmark.
Making the selection fromthe nominees forwarded by
GBIF national Participants,
the GBIF Science Committee
recognized Araújo’s
groundbreaking researchin deploying biodiversity
informatics to model andforecast environmental phenomena, specifically the effects
of different climate change scenarios on regional and global
biodiversity patterns.

GBits Science Supplement

GBIF PARTICIPATION � � � � � � � 2
Israel joins GBIFINFORMATICS � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3
IPT v2.0.5 released

AROUND THE NETWORK � � � � 3
US launches new biodiversity data system
New web portal maps ant species in BelgiumFirst Spanish data paper published
Bioblitzes mark World Biodiversity Day
GBIF 2012 Annual Report and Science Review
New portal on biodiversity of the Albertine Rift
OpenUp! reaches one million mark

REGIONAL COLLABORATION4
African nodes identify priorities for data
mobilization and researchStrengthening capacity in Latin America
Workshop surveys species list status in East Asia

NEW DATA � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5
GBIF APPLICATIONS � � � � � � � � 6
Upgraded Map of Life now uses all GBIF-mediatedrecords

GBIF IN THE NEWS � � � � � � � � � 7
UPCOMING EVENTS � � � � � � � � 7

In comments published on the GBIF website, Araújo urged
biologists to ‘think bigger’ and collaborate on large-scale
projects to answer critical questions relating to life on
Earth.
Read more…
Hear an audio interview with Miguel Araújo…
The Science Committee also announced the winners of the2013 GBIF Young Researchers Award. For details, see p 2.

To subscribe to the newsletter, please contact info@gbif.org

GBitsSCIENCE AND POLICY
Young Researchers Award winners
announced
The GBIF Science Committee has announced the twowinners of the €4,000 Young Researchers Award,
which fosters innovative research and discovery
by graduate students at universities in countries
participating in the GBIF network.
Emma Gomez-Ruiz, a Mexican PhD student currently
based at Texas A&M University in the United States,
plans to map the ‘nectar corridor’, the migratory
path of the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat(Leptonycteris nivalis), using models derived fromGBIF-mediated data. The nectar-feeding bats follow
agave blooms during their annual migration from
central Mexico to the southern United States, andare important pollinators for several plant species.
Gomez-Ruiz aims to improve understanding of thecorridor including the effects of climate change, tosupport conservation of the species.

GBits Science Supplement
As usual, the GBits Science Supplement is also
published alongside this newsletter. Among the
research highlighted in the current issue is a highprofile study in Nature Climate Change using GBIFmediated biodiversity records to forecast major
reductions in the geographic ranges of thousandsof common plant and animal species due to climatechange. The study received worldwide media
coverage, and was featured in a news release on the
GBIF website.
Also featured in the current Science Supplement arestudies on the ‘dirty dozen’ high-risk aquatic invasive
species in the United Kingdom; on the effectivenessof protected areas in Brazil’s seasonally-dry forests;
and on the importance of conserving rare species toprotect critical functions of ecosystems.
Download GBits Science Supplement...

GBIF PARTICIPATION
Israel joins GBIFThe state of Israel has become the latest Participant
in GBIF.
The director of the Israel Nature and Parks
Authority (INPA), Shaul Goldstein, signed the GBIF
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which setsout steps to promote and facilitate free and open
access to biodiversity data to support research andpolicy.

Nathan Ranc, a French master’s student at
Stockholm University in Sweden, will assess biases
in GBIF-mediated data bycomparing records for 269
mammal species in the
Mediterranean region,
available through the GBIF
network, with a databasethat he plans to draw up
independently. Ranc’s
project, in association withLa Sapienza Universityof Rome, Italy, will help
design data mobilization
strategies by identifying
species and areas forwhich there is little
2
availabledata.

2

Commenting on the announcement, the chief
scientist at INPA, Yehoshua Shkedy said: “This step
represents Israel’s commitment to global efforts inbiodiversity conservation and management. The richscientific activity on biodiversity in Israel including
museum collections and ecological research make theformal association of Israel to GBIF a real contribution
to enhancing the availability and usage of biodiversity
data, and to international collaboration on nature
conservation and research.”
Israel has already made progress in coordinating
biodiversity data, with the development of BioGIS,
the Israel Biodiversity Website, a joint project
integrating biodiversity data from different institutes.
The site provides advanced tools for querying,
analysing, modelling and visualizing patterns ofspecies distributions.
Initially, Israel joins GBIF as an Associate Participant,with the option of moving within five years to Voting
Participant status.
Read more…

Aug 2011no 34 May 2013

In another change to GBIF participation, Andorra has
moved from Associate Participant status to that of
Voting Participant.

The data from the atlas have been published to
GBIF, and are described in a data paper published in
Zookeys journal.

INFORMATICSFirst Spanish data paper published

IPT v2.0.5 released
A new version of the GBIF Integrated Publishing
Toolkit (IPT) is now available for use. Enhancements
include a version in Portuguese, the ability toconfigure datasets for automatic publishing, easiercustomizations and a number of bug fixes.
For details, read our developers’ blog post...
The IPT was translated into Portuguese thanks tothe efforts of volunteers at the Research Center on
Biodiversity and Computing, Universidade de São
Paulo, Brazil.

AROUND THE NETWORK
US launches new biodiversity datasystemThe US Geological Survey (USGS), which hosts the
GBIF node for the United States, has launched a new
web portal offering access to more than 100 million
records of nearly every species occurring in the
country.
Much of the data included in the Biodiversity
Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) portal andassociated web services comes from institutions
publishing datasets through the GBIF global network.
The website includes interactive maps that enable
users to visualize species occurrence records
alongside more than 50 additional map layers ofenvironmental information.

New web portal maps ant species in
Belgium
The Belgian Biodiversity Platform, host of the GBIF
national node, has launched a new digital atlas to help
visualize the distribution of ant species in Belgium.
The portal provides access to the ‘Formidabel’
database including over 27,000 records of 76 nativeand nine introduced ant species in the country. Data
come from field research, museum collections andliterature. The oldest occurrence record goes back to
May 1866, and the most recent is from August 2012.
Formidabel (FORMIcidaeDAtabaseBELgium) is
the result of a collaboration between the Belgian
Biodiversity Platform and two working groups on
Flemish and Wallonian ants.

A peer-reviewed data paper describing the collectionof Odonata – dragonflies and damselflies - at the
University of Oviedo, Spain, has been published in thejournal ZooKeys.
The manuscript was generated as part of a workshop
on publishing data papers, organized by GBIF Spain in
Madrid in March. The event gathered 21 participantsfrom institutes publishing data through GBIF, andmore data papers produced during the workshop areunder preparation or review.
The workshop was among three co-ordinated projects
supported by GBIF core funds to stimulate authoringof detailed dataset descriptions (metadata) andpublishing them as data papers in academic journals.
More information on the workshop…

Bioblitzes mark World Biodiversity Day
A number of GBIF national node organizationsorganized bioblitzes to mark the 2013 International
Day for Biological Diversity on 22 May, adopted by theUnited Nations General Assembly in 2000 to increase
understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues.
In a bioblitz, members of the public join volunteer
scientists in designated locations to record species
over a given period, usually 24 hours. The records canthen be made available online including through the
GBIF network.
In Ireland: more than 260 people gathered on
25 May for the annual bioblitz organized by the
National Biodiversity Data Centre. It involves afriendly competition between four locations, inthe Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland, eachseeking a prize for the greatest number of recorded
species. Colebrooke Estate, a private estate in County
Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, emerged as the winnerwith recorders tallying 1,086 species over the 24hour period. Part of the bioblitz was broadcast liveon the national television channel RTÉ One. More on
Ireland’s 2013 bioblitz…
In Costa Rica: citizen scientists counted 236 species
during a bioblitz on 26-27 May at INBioparque, an
ecological park near the capital San Jose, ownedby the host of GBIF’s national node INBio. The
bioblitz recorded species from 17 insect families
not previously encountered in the park, including:seven new families of Coleoptera (beetles), four new
families of Diptera (flies and mosquitos), three new33GBitsfamilies of bedbugs, and one new family each of
Lepidoptera (butterflies), Neuroptera (ant lions) anddragonflies.
In Denmark: the Danish Biodiversity Information
Facility (DanBIF) joined forces with the University of
Copenhagen’s Natural History Museum to organize
a bioblitz on 17 May in Østre Anlæag, a public parkin the capital Copenhagen. The event involved
around 200 schoolchildren and 28 experts in various
taxonomic groups. The tally at the end of the day was
357 species.

New portal on biodiversity of theAlbertine Rift
The Albertine Rift Biodiversity Monitoring andInformation System (ARBMIS) has launched a
new portal giving information about the uniquebiodiversity of this region of eastern Africa. The
Albertine Rift Conservation Society (ARCOS), a GBIF
Associate Participant, has collaborated with otherpartners in the region to develop the portal, which isfunded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation.
The Albertine Rift, part of a mountain biodiversity
hotspot, falls across portions of Rwanda, Burundi,
Uganda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic ofCongo. The mountains in the area are volcanic in
origin, and include the Virunga National Park, home
to mountain gorillas.
Read more…

OpenUp! reaches one million markThe European Union project OpenUp!, which has
been running for two years, has now made over a
million multimedia objects available through theEuropean digital library Europeana. The objects

GBIF 2012 Annual Report and Science
Review
GBIF is pleased to announce publication of
the 2012 Annual Report. For the first time,
this is accompanied by a new annual Science
Review, documenting more than 230 peerreviewed research studies making use of GBIFmediated data in 2012. Both publications can beaccessed online and printed copies are available
on request.
Download 2012 Annual Report...
Download 2012 Science Review...
44include high quality photos, videos, audio recordings,
and natural history artworks.
The project has also published over 300 documents
such as handbooks, videos and slide presentations
related to the project, as well as other publicationsof interest to the biodiversity information and digital
library domains.
OpenUp! is one of a number of EU-funded projects
in which GBIF nodes collaborate. The Botanic Garden
and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM), which
coordinates the GBIF nodes in Germany, leads the
project.
News updates and content highlights are available
through the Open-Up blog.

REGIONAL COLLABORATION
African nodes identify priorities for data
mobilization and research
The GBIF Participant nodes in Africa have identified
invasive alien species, endemics, marine data,
genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) and medicinal
plants as key themes to guide data mobilization andresearch in the region.
Twelve GBIF national nodes and internationalorganizations from Africa discussed these priorities
at a regional meeting held in Pretoria in April.
Participants from Angola and Namibia, not yet
members of GBIF, took part in the meeting as
strategic partners.
The African nodes also established a task team to
identify a regional project on invasive alien species

Aug 2011

to demonstrate the data-science interface. The
South African National Biodiversity Institute, whichhosts the GBIF national node, will appoint a regional
coordinator, funded through the JRS Biodiversity
Foundation, to develop a Biodiversity Data
Assessment and Action Plan for southern Africa andcurrent GBIF nodes.

Strengthening capacity in Latin America

no 34 May 2013

amphibians and reptiles, and mammals from its
collections. The museum hosts important historicalcollections including that of ornithologist James
Henry Fleming, which was once considered the mostcomprehensive private collection of birds in North
America. Skins of extinct bird species, including New
Zealand Huias, Labrador Duck, Great Auk, Carolina
Parakeet and 132 passenger pigeon specimens arepart of the museum’s holdings. The museum also
holds skins of the highly endangered Hawaiian
Honeycreepers and Darwin’s finches.

The hosts of GBIF nodes in Spain, Costa Rica
and Mexico co-organized a workshop in April tostrengthen regional capacity in Latin America to use
data and information technologies for biodiversity
conservation.

United States

The five-day training event brought together 31
participants from nine countries – Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua,
Venezuela and Spain, at La Selva Biological Station in
Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí, Costa Rica.

Data published by the Georgia Southern University
are from the herpetology collection of the Savannah
Science Museum. The collection’s 35,000 specimens
contain representations of 95 per cent of the reptiles
and amphibians of Georgia.

The event was funded by the Ibero-American
Programme for Science, Technology and Development(CYTED), an Associate Participant of GBIF. It was
the second in a series of regional workshops underthe Iberoamerican Infrastructure for Biodiversity
Information (I3B) project, with further events plannedfor Mexico in 2014 and Brazil in 2015.

The Perot Museum, begun by the Dallas Museumof Natural History in the 1930s, published data
records from the southern United States ranging
from paleontological specimens to recent zoologicalrecords.

More information on the workshop...

Workshop surveys species list status in
East Asia
Participants including GBIF node managers fromJapan, Korea and Chinese Taipei identified gaps
in digitized lists of threatened species (Red List),
invasive alien species and checklists from the East andSoutheast Asia region, at a workshop held in Japanin March. Standardizing data content and options for
publishing data from the region to GBIF were also
explored.
The event was organized as part of a collaborative
initiative among Asian nodes on mobilizing checklist
data, and was held at the National Museum of Natureand Science in Ibaraki, Japan, which hosts the national
GBIF node.

NEW DATA
CanadaThe Royal Ontario Museum, based in Toronto, Canada
has published nearly a third of a million records ofbirds (http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14791,
http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14794),

Two new publishers – the Georgia Southern University
and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in
Dallas, Texas – have shared records through GBIF.

Both datasets are hosted by VertNet, a project fundedby the National Science Foundation in the UnitedStates to mobilize data from vertebrate collections.

Colombia
Data on plants, birds and ants from Colombia’s coffeegrowing landscapes are among some 90,000 new
records published from the country. The National
Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia publishedthe survey records as part of a project to incorporate
biodiversity into areas used for coffee production.
Other new datasets from Colombia include plants
surveyed from a wetland restoration project involving
local fishing communities in the Magdalena Riverbasin and specimens from the Colombian Amazon
herbarium, located at the Amazon Institute of
Scientific Research (SINCHI).

Venezuela
Data covering nearly 1,000 insect species fromSouth and Central America, from a collection held in
Caracas, Venezuela, are now accessible through the
GBIF portal. Venezuela is not currently a memberof GBIF, but the Universidad Central de Venezuela
published the 27,500 insect records from the Museodel Instituto de Zoologia Agricola (MIZA) throughendorsement from the Inter-American Biodiversity
Information Network (IABIN), a GBIF Associate
Participant.

55GBitsNicaragua
The Entomological Museum of León, a private
collection based in Nicaragua, has published 126,500
records of insects from Central America and aroundthe world. Nicaragua is not currently a member of
GBIF and the publisher was endorsed by the IberoAmerican Programme for Science, Technology andDevelopment (CYTED), another GBIF Associate
Participant.

ecosystems, located mainly in Venezuela, Colombia,
Peru and Ecuador, where its researchers have beenworking since 1970.
Other new records published from the Netherlands
include a dataset published by the Natural History ofRotterdam of over 135,000 observations of moths in
the country, covering over 400 species, gathered in
1964.

Germany

Spain

More than half a million records of fossil marine
plankton species from around the world are publishedby the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. The records
are from the Neptune Deep-Sea Microfossil Database,which brings together records from sediment cores
collected over several decades in three major ocean
drilling programmes.

GBIF Spain has published 283,000 records containedin 10 datasets. One of the datasets is from the
Spanish Institute of Oceanography with records forfish species captured between 100 and 2000 metres
depth off the Mauritanian coast. Records of morethan 150 species from 71 families are captured in thedataset.

Another fossil dataset is published by the Freie
Universität Berlin which has shared over 6,000
records from its paleontological collection used forteaching and independent study.

Other records published by GBIF Spain include plantdata from five herbaria, records of crustaceans, anddata from the palaeontological collection of theMuseum of Natural History in Barcelona.

An atlas of robber flies (Asilidae) in Germany ispublished as a new dataset by the Senckenberg
museum in Frankfurt. The dataset, consisting ofnearly 15,000 records, includes data on all of the
81 species in the family with confirmed records inGermany.

Austria
The Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, locatedin Innsbruck, Austria, has published nearly 100,000
records of moths and butterflies from parts of Austria,
Germany, Italy and Slovenia.

FranceJapan
The National Institute of Genetics has published32,600 records of beetles from the database ofground beetles of Japan.

Republic of Korea
Nearly one million new records have been publishedfrom the Republic of Korea. They include a datasetof green algae records from the Korean Biological
Resources Centre and three datasets from the Korea
Forest Service including birds, plants, and nearly
360,000 records from South Korea’s largest insect
specimen database.

The National Museum of Natural History, which hosts
the GBIF node in the country, has published 54,300
records from a survey of freshwater fish in France.
The aim of the project was to collect distribution data
and revise an atlas of freshwater fish in the country.

GBIF APPLICATIONSNetherlands

The Map of Life has upgraded its portal to include
all georeferenced records served through GBIF. The
project developed in the United States to build up a
global knowledge base on the distribution of species,
previously used only vertebrate records.

Plant data covering four decades of research in
the alpine tundra landscapes in the Andes havebeen published by the Institute for Biodiversity andEcosystem Dynamics (IBED) at the University of
Amsterdam. The institute has shared 15 datasets
including nearly 45,000 records from the Páramo

6

6

Upgraded Map of Life now uses all GBIFmediated records

Read more about the upgrade…

Aug 2011

GBIF IN THE NEWS
GBIF was featured on the Science in Action
programme on BBC World Service Radio in May.
Listen to it...
A special feature in the Financial Times included areport on Colombia’s biodiversity, with informationfrom SiB Colombia, the GBIF national node.
Read the report here…
The web portal on biodiversity in the transboundary
Greater Region – situated between the Rhine,
Moselle, Saar and Meuse rivers – was presented at apress conference held on 23 May in Trier, Germany.
The portal provides information about the distributionof more than 300 animal and plant species in thearea.
For more information on the portal, please contact
André Heughebaert, GBIF Belgium at a.heughebaert@
biodiversity.be.

no 34 May 2013

Training events
Workshop on the promotion of metadata use anddata paper publication by GBIF India
19-21 June 2013, Pune, India
More information…
VertNet Biodiversity Informatics Training Workshop II
24-28 June 2013, Boulder, USA
More information…
Summer Course Modelling and Mapping Species
Distributions
1-4 July 2013, Amsterdam, Netherlands
More information…
Building Biodiversity Informatics Institutions Course
23-26 July 2013, Cape Town, South Africa
More information…
Biodiversity Informatics Data Analysis Training Course
29 July - 2 August 2013, Cape Town, South Africa
More information…

UPCOMING EVENTS
Meetings and workshops
Webinar: Digitization through DNA barcoding andinformatics
10-11 July 2013, online
Associated with the 12th Pacific Science InterCongress, Suva, FijiMore information...

VISION OF GBIF: A world in which biodiversity
information is freely and universally available forscience, society, and a sustainable future.

MISSION OF GBIF: To be the foremost global resourcefor biodiversity information, and engender smart
solutions for environmental and human well-being.

GBIF Secretariat
Universitetsparken 15
DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø
Denmark

Tel: +45 35 32 14 70
Fax: +45 35 32 14 80
E-mail: info@gbif.org

http://www.gbif.org/

GBits archive: http://www.gbif.org/communications/
resources/newsletters/
77