GBits

no. 36 Sep 2013

PARTNERSHIPS � � � � � � � � � � � � � 2free and open access to biodiversity data

New GBIF portal going
live
GBIF is using the 20th meeting of its Governing Board tolaunch a new version of its global web portal, providing
greatly enhanced access to the world’s largest database ofdocumented evidence for the distribution of species acrossthe planet.
The event is being broadcast online via https://new.
livestream.com/gbif/.

GBIF Secretariat to coordinate Global InvasiveSpecies Information Partnership

NEW MEMBERS � � � � � � � � � � � � � 2
Chinese Academy of Sciences is newest GBIF
Participant
Data publishing network VertNet joins GBIFTRAINING � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3
Ecological niche modelling training videos
available
Data digitization training held in Madagascar

NEW DATA � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3
BrazilChinese Taipei
CanadaColombia

Read more on page 2...

Denmark

New framework to deliverbiodiversity knowledge
A new initiative launchedthis month aims tocoordinate global efforts
and funding to deliver thebest possible information
about life on Earth, andour impacts upon it.
The Global Biodiversity
Informatics Outlook
sets out a framework toharness the immense
power of information technology and an open data culture
to gather unprecedented evidence about biodiversity andto inform better decisions.

GermanyJapan
NorwayUnited Kingdom
United States

GBIF IN THE NEWS � � � � � � � � � 4
AROUND THE NETWORK � � � � 5
New report released on national biodiversity
profiling

UPCOMING EVENTS � � � � � � � � 5
Meetings and workshops
Training events

The framework is outlined in a document and website
entitled Delivering Biodiversity Knowledge in theInformation Age, inviting policy makers, funders,researchers, informatics specialists, data holders and others
to unite around four key focus areas where progress isneeded.
Visit the GBIO website for more information...

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

GBitsContd… New GBIF portal going live
GBIF’s new web portal combines data search andcommunication into a single platform, enablingusers to discover and access examples of researchuses, tools, methodologies and national activities– thus helping to demonstrate GBIF’s value to all
stakeholders.
The portal’s launch is open to the press and public
and is being streamed live via https://new.livestream.
com/gbif/.
The launch is accompanied by presentations showing
how GBIF’s partners in Colombia and Japan areproviding free and open access to information aboutbiodiversity in their own countries, using open-source
tools and resources developed by the global network.
Later on the same day, the annual GBIF Science
Symposium, also being streamed live, is showcasing
key uses of the data made available through thenetwork, including the identification of priority areasfor plant conservation in South America; and aninvestigation of how tropical forests are responding toclimate change.
See the science symposium programme...

GBIF Secretariat to coordinate Global
Invasive Species Information Partnership
The GBIF Secretariat is to coordinate a global initiative
to improve the information available to decision
makers to help tackle the threat of invasive alien
species.
Under an agreement with the Secretariat of theConvention on Biological Diversity (SCBD), theGBIF Secretariat will be the primary focal pointof the Global Invasive Alien Species Information
Partnership (GIASIP), which brings together a numberof organizations (see) focussed on improving theinteroperability of different information sources on
this major driver of biodiversity loss.
Through the agreement, GBIF’s role includes leading
the implementation of the GIASIP information
infrastructure and linking or integrating it with theGBIF data network.

NEW MEMBERS
Chinese Academy of Sciences is newest
GBIF Participant
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the national
academy in China for the natural sciences, is the2latest organization to become a GBIF Participant.

2The Academy signed the GBIF Memorandum ofUnderstanding making it an organizational Associate
Participant. The new status gives CAS a place on
the GBIF Governing Board and the possibility ofendorsing institutions to publish data via GBIF.
The institution launched the GBIF-CAS node on 14
September in a ceremony in Shanghai and has started
work on a data portal that will help mobilize datafrom China and the East Asia region.
Keping Ma, Professor of Plant Ecology at the Instituteof Botany, CAS and temporary Head of Delegation
to GBIF said, “As part of the GBIF family, CAS will
work to promote the development of biodiversity
informatics. Our priorities will be to publish data fromChina, promote the use of GBIF data and enhance thedevelopment and integration of biodiversity datasetsfrom different institutions in the country.
“We hope to help address the biodiversity data gap of
the GBIF network in Asia”, he added.
CAS was established in 1949 and includes thirteen
branches in various regions in China, over a hundred
institutes and two universities. The headquartersof the Academy are located in the Chinese capital,
Beijing.
The organization is active in many biodiversity
informatics activities globally and in the Asian region,including the establishment of the Asia Biodiversity
Conservation and Database Network (ABCDNet). It
is the Chinese partner within the Catalogue of Life,
the Encyclopedia of Life, the Biodiversity Heritage
Library and a range of other international biodiversity
initiatives and is engaged in digitization of national
collections and collection of field observations andimages from survey activities and from the broader
public.
Donald Hobern, Executive Secretary of GBIF
commented, “CAS is a natural partner for GBIF andwe look forward to working with the Academy tointegrate more data from east Asia into GBIF and todeveloping a closer relationship with China.”

Data publishing network VertNet joins
GBIF
VertNet, a network that provides open accessto vertebrate natural history collections andobservations, is now an Associate Participant of GBIF.
It will now have a place on the GBIF Governing Boardand is able to endorse institutions wishing to publish
data through the GBIF network.
VertNet is funded by the National Science Foundationin the United States and aims to make vertebrate
data from observations and collections available
online. It currently helps to mobilize collections from38 countries.

Aug 2011

The chair of the VertNet steering committee, Robert
Guralnick said, “VertNet is excited to be able to serveas an Associate Participant. We have been working
not only in the United States, but also more broadly
to help publishers make their data available online.
The move to official Associate Participant status isa benefit especially for those publishers located incountries that are not yet GBIF Participants.”

TRAINING
Ecological niche modelling training videos
available
Videos from the ecological niche modelling workshop
organized by GBIF Spain in May 2013 are now
available at http://www.gbif.es/videos/videos.
php. All sessions, including the discussions, can beviewed via the link, and learning materials can beaccessed at http://www.gbif.es/formaciondetalles.
php?IDForm=110#descargas.

Data digitization training held inMadagascar

no 36 Sep 2013

The records in the GBIF dataset are digitized fromhundreds of thousands of herbarium vouchers,
containing dried plant specimens and labels giving
information such as the species, location and dateof collection and the name of the collector. All of
this information is now searchable via the GBIF data
portal.

Chinese Taipei
The Taiwan Biodiversity Information Facility (TaiBIF)
has published over 11,000 records of moths, based oncitizen observations. The data come from an online
community, whose members post images of mothswith dates and locations onto a Facebook page.
Members discuss and identify the species, and thedata are then captured and stored.
Activities such as ‘Moth Alerts’, where moderators
post an image of a moth species and invite groupmembers to post other images with date and location
data, have encouraged the sharing of information.

The Madagascar Biodiversity Information Facility(MadBIF) and the Madagascar Biodiversity Network(REBIOMA) organized biodiversity informatics training
on 22 and 23 August. Twenty-three participants fromthe University of Mahajanga were trained in digitizing
and publishing biodiversity data during the event.

NEW DATABrazil
A major plant collection founded by the Brazilian
emperor in the 19th century has become the firstdataset from Brazil to be published through GBIF
since the country joined the network last year.
More than half a million individual records from the
Rio de Janeiro Botanic Gardens (JBRJ) Herbarium can
now be searched and downloaded via the GBIF dataportal.
The dataset is focussed on Brazilian and SouthAmerican flora, and includes specimens collected bysome of the most important naturalists of the 19thand 20th centuries.
The initial collection was made up of 25,000
specimens donated by the emperor Dom Pedro II
in the late 19th century, including the herbariumof the French botanist Antoine-Laurent ApollinaireFee. Other notable botanists whose specimens areincluded in the collection are Adolpho Ducke, Johan
Löfgren, João Geraldo Kuhlmann, Paulo Campos Portoand Alexander Curt Brade.

The Facebook group can be accessed at https://www.
facebook.com/groups/enjoymoths/.
TaiBIF has also published over 9,000 records of mothsfrom the collection and surveys of the Endemic
Species Research Institute in Taiwan. Images ofspecimens are available on Flickr and licensed under
CC-BY for public use.

CanadaCanada’s oldest botanical garden, based at theUniversity of British Columbia and established in
1916, has published 9,500 records of plants curated
in its gardens. Nearly 90 per cent of taxa represented
in the gardens’ collection are included in the dataset
available through the GBIF data portal.
The University’s botanical gardens hold a collectionof around 12,000 plants representing 8,000 taxa fromtemperate regions around the world.
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GBitsThe Spencer Entomological Collection, the second
largest in western Canada, has published 4,500
records relating to 475 insect species occurring in
the country. The collection has particularly strong
holdings of true bugs, dragonflies and damselflies,
fleas and lice. Images of some of the specimens
held in the collection are available at http://www.
biodiversity.ubc.ca/entomology_pictures/.

Colombia
Colombia continued to add datasets from its
institutions to the GBIF network, bringing the totalof records published from the country to nearly amillion. The latest datasets are from the Asociaciónpara el estudio y conservación de las aves acuáticas
en Colombia, which has published 4,300 observation
records of aquatic birds from the country’s Caribbeancoast. Data come from 39 locations in six of the eight
departments of the region.
The Association has also published over 400
occurrence records of birds from the Sanquianga
National Park on the Pacific coast of Colombia.
The data come from a survey which focussed onwhimbrels (Numenius phaeopus) in the protectedarea, but data on other bird species were also
gathered via counts at roosting areas. The dataset
contains information on 32 species of birds.

Denmark
The Department of Bioscience at the Aarhus
University has published 1.1 million vegetation data
records from detailed surveys of the protected areasin the country. The inspections were carried out toensure uniform and reproducible ways of gathering
data, and contribute to protected area management.
More information on the technical specifications forthe surveys...

Germany
A new publisher, the Natural History Museum ofMainz has made available over half a million recordsof plant observation data from all over Germany, withan emphasis on Rhineland-Palatinate – one of the 16
federal states of the country. Almost all the plant data
were collected after 1990, and have been integrated
into a recent distribution mapping project on the floraof Germany.
The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, host of the 20th
meeting of the GBIF Governing Board, has published
47,500 records from its collection of Sphaeroceridae– a family of true flies that are commonly referred toas dung flies. These flies are found all over the world
barring places with permanent ice cover.
44Japan
The National Institute of Genetics, located in Mishima,eastern Japan, has published 7,900 records of plantsfrom the Fuji-Hakone-Izu national park. Data werecollected by members of a volunteer association
who have been monitoring plant species along hiking
trails in the park since 2001. The observation records
gathered have been published as a data paper in thepeer-reviewed journal Ecological Research.

NorwayMore than a quarter of a million records of Norwegianseabirds, gathered as part of a long-term monitoringand mapping programme, have been published by
the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. The
programme, called SEAbird POPulations (SEAPOP) wasset up in 2005, and aims to map the distribution ofbreeding and wintering seabirds along the coastlinesof Norway and the Svalbard archipelago. The data
gathered will help maintain in better management of
the marine environment.

United Kingdom
The People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), aregistered charity, has published 16,200 records ofhedgehogs from a 2005-2006 survey, when volunteer
recorders and rural landowners in Britain and Ireland
were asked to send in information on sightings of thespecies in their gardens. The Trust has also published3,300 records from a survey which logged when
hedgehogs came out of hibernation. Hedgehogs are aflagship species – a decline in their numbers indicatesa deterioration of the environment.

United States
The Essig Museum of Entomology, a new GBIF
publisher, has made available over a 150,000 records
of insects through the GBIF network. The museum’s
focus is the surveying of Californian insects, whichis reflected in the large number of records from thestate.

GBIF IN THE NEWSIn the last two months, GBIF was mentioned in• a special report in the Economist on the impactof economic growth on biodiversity. Read thearticle…
• an article on the role of technology in saving
biodiversity, in Huffington Post’s Green Section.
Read the article…
• an article on the value of natural history
collections, in The Conversation, a research newssite. Read the article…

Aug 2011

AROUND THE NETWORK

no 36 Sep 2013

Training events

GB20 Nodes training course: building stronger GBIF
Nodes
4-5 October 2013, Berlin, Germany
More information…

New report released on national
biodiversity profilingA new study by CSIRO, the Australian Bureau ofMeteorology and the Atlas of Living Australia explores
combining data from natural history collections andconservation agencies with mapping data to help setup a system to monitor biodiversity at the nationaland continental scales.

Online workshop about georeferencing using
GEOLocate by GBIF Spain
16-30 October 2013, Internet
More information…
Training session for African local governments as partof the 2013 Local Climate Solutions Congress
30 October - 1 November 2013, Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania
More information…

Results of the study are published in the report
Biodiversity Profiling: Components of a continental
biodiversity information capability.
Read a blog post on the study….

Workshop for German herbarium curators
Co-organized by GBIF Germany and the German
Society for Biological Systematics (GfBS)
4-5 November 2013, Berlin, Germany
More information (in German)…

UPCOMING EVENTS
Meetings and workshops

Introduction to workflows for taxonomic refinement,
biogeographic analysis, and species distribution
modelling by BioVeL
26-27 November 2013, Cardiff, UK
More information…

20th meeting of the GBIF Governing Board, new GBIF
portal launch and Science Symposium
8-10 October 2013, Berlin, Germany
More information…
17th Meeting of the CBD Subsidiary Body on
Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA)
14-18 October 2013, Montreal, Canada
More information…
Global Botanic Gardens Congress
20-25 October 2013, Dunedin, New ZealandMore information…
5th International Barcode of Life Conference
27-31 October 2013, Kunming, China
More information…
TDWG Annual Conference
30 October - 1 November 2013, Florence, Italy
More 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 ØDenmark

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/

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