GBits

no. 28 May 2012SCIENCE AND POLICY � � � � � � 2
New global science-policy platform establishedfree and open access to biodiversity data

CBD Executive Secretary calls for urgent
improvement in biodiversity monitoring

GBIF science awards
target novel research
on climate, ecology andevolution

Second GBits Science Supplement publishedThis year’s €30,000 Ebbe Nielsen Prize should contributeto better understanding of how plants respond to climatechange, following the selection of Nathan Swenson fromthe United States to receive the prestigious annual award
funded by GBIF.
The decision was made by the GBIF Science Committee,
which also chose a PhD student from Argentina and amaster’s student from Colombia to receive the 2012 Young
Researchers Award, for promising work on biogeography
and species distributions.
The Ebbe Nielsen Prize, named in memory of the Danish
scientist whose work helped to inspire GBIF and who
died shortly before its establishment in 2001, is awarded
annually to researchers in early stages of their career,
who combine biosystematics and biodiversity informatics
research in novel ways.
The 2012 winner, Nathan Swenson, is associate professor
at the Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State
University. His work demonstrates how occurrence datasuch as those available through GBIF can help understandthe impact of climate on species distributions.
Swenson proposes to use the award towards a projectthat uses data published through GBIF, and data from theiPlant Tree of Life programme, for a large-scale analysis
to study the evolution of climatic niches in plants. The
analysis will be carried out jointly with the Ecoinformatics
and Biodiversity Group at the Department of Bioscience,
Aarhus University, Denmark.
In a statement submitted during his nomination, Swenson
says: “We could quantify for the first time how quickly or
slowly climatic niches evolve in seed plants. The findings
would have direct implications for our understanding of
how plants may or may not respond to temporal changes
in global climate.”
More on page 2...

GBIF Annual Report 2011 now available

DATA PUBLISHING� � � � � � � � � � 3
Guide on managing biodiversity data from local
government
GBIF guide for citing biodiversity data
GBIF data index jumps 13% in April-May

NEW DATA� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3
NEW PUBLISHERS � � � � � � � � � � 4
GBIF COMMUNITY � � � � � � � � � � 5
Globally-hosted data integrated into Australiannational portal
New data portal on Belgian flora
Repository for Antarctic genomic data underdevelopment
First ever Costa Rican BioBlitz organizedPortal on Chilean biodiversity createdInventory of Ireland’s biodiversity launched

GBIF PARTNERS � � � � � � � � � � � � 6
EOL reaches one million species pages milestone
New project manager at OBIS

GBIF APPLICATIONS� � � � � � � � 7
Map of Life launches demo site
Phone app for wildlife sightings uses GBIFmediated data

TRAINING AND CAPACITYBUILDING� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 7
New training videos available
Tanzanian capacity building project comes to aclose

OPPORTUNITIES� � � � � � � � � � � � 8Call for proposals for digitization projects

UPCOMING EVENTS � � � � � � � � 82012 Biodiversity Information Management ForumRio+20, United Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development
GBIC 2012, Global Biodiversity Informatics
ConferenceGBits
The two winners of the 2012 Young ResearchersAward, each receiving €4,000 each, are:
• Salvador Arias, a PhD student at the Universidad
Nacional de Tucumán in Argentina. He hasdeveloped the Vicariance Inference Programme(VIP), which uses georeferenced data to explore
the splitting of the geographical ranges of groupsof organisms because of barriers to gene flow or
species’ movement.
• Elkin Tenorio Moreno, a master’s student at the
Department of Biological Sciences, Universidad
de los Andes in Colombia. He plans to use theaward to analyse dispersal patterns of Amazonianand Andean birds across climatic and geographic
barriers, using GBIF-mediated data.
• An additional seed grant has been awarded to a
Tanzanian master’s student, Bujiku Kipondya, forresearch using data published through GBIF to
determine the distribution of dung beetle species
along the Pare Mountains in northeast Tanzania.
Read full story…

SCIENCE AND POLICY
New global science-policy platform
established
Governments have formally agreed to establish the
new Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), with asecretariat based in Bonn, Germany.
The decision was made at the second plenary session
on the platform, held from 16-21 April in Panama City,
Panama.
The meeting was principally about establishing rules
and procedures for the new platform, and detailed
decisions on its work programme have yet to be
made. However, the role of existing institutions incontributing to the work of IPBES was discussed ata side event jointly hosted by the GBIF Secretariat,
IUCN and the UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring
Centre.
At the side event, GBIF Executive Secretary Donald
Hobern emphasized the complementary role
between the two institutions. He said that while
IPBES would operate at the science-policy interface,
GBIF’s unique global mandate was to provide a wellorganized and robust data-science interface.
Hobern added that GBIF was well placed to deliverdatasets aligned with the needs of the assessments
IPBES will carry out, and that he expected IPBES toplay an important role in identifying priorities forbiodiversity data activities.
2

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CBD Executive Secretary calls for urgent
improvement in biodiversity monitoring
The new Executive Secretary of the Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD), Braulio Dias, has called forurgent steps to improve the collection of data andmonitoring of biodiversity to help meet global targets.
Dias was opening the latest meeting of the CBD’s
subsidiary body on scientific, technical andtechnological advice (SBSTTA), in Montreal, Canada.
He observed that each time a new biodiversity report
was produced, it seemed we had to look afresh forcomparable sources of information and data, with theresult that conclusions tended to be qualitative withlittle precise data on important issues.
“We must urgently put in place a continuous
monitoring system for the Aichi Biodiversity Targets,”
Dias observed.
“It will require making observations relevant tobiodiversity on a systematic basis and with thenecessary frequency and resolution, managing thisinformation so that it can be used for assessments
and for deriving indicators, improving our models andfor making better projections.”
Dias concluded: “I strongly believe that unless weare able to monitor biodiversity in an adequate way,
we will not be able to manage our biodiversity in asatisfactory manner and we will fail to achieve the
Aichi Biodiversity Targets.”
Among the formal recommendations made during
the SBSTTA meeting were several recognizing GBIF’s
role in providing biodiversity information, including
as a contributor to the fourth Global Biodiversity
Outlook document, due to be completed in 2014.

Second GBits Science Supplement
published
GBits subscribers are invited to view the second
edition of the supplement giving details of the usesof GBIF-mediated data in scientific literature overthe past two months. Among nearly forty papers
listed are studies of the impacts of large-scale watertransfers on freshwater fish diversity, a visualizationof the species potentially put at risk by the 2010 Gulf
of Mexico oil spill, and a review of methods to assess
the conservation status of all known plants.
You can access the Science Supplement here…

GBIF Annual Report 2011 now available
The Annual Report on GBIF’s worldwide activities forlast year has a special focus on the uses in scientificresearch and policy tools of data published throughthe GBIF network. Marking the tenth anniversaryAug 2011

year of the organization, the report looks at its
achievements to date measured against the originalvision of the OECD science forum in 1999 which
recommended setting up GBIF. The Annual Report
also reviews significant progress during 2011 on
informatics tools, data publishing, training andcapacity programmes around the network.
The report can be accessed online here and printed
copies are available on request from info@gbif.org.

DATA PUBLISHING
Guide on managing biodiversity datafrom local government
Local governments around the world have a new tool
to help share and use vast amounts of biodiversity
knowledge collected in the course of their work.
A best practice guide published by GBIF, and ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, with the supportof the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD),
details the simple steps needed to preserve data andmake them accessible via the Internet.

no 28 May 2012

The new document, Recommended practices forcitation of data published through the GBIF network
describes a set of styles which data publishers should
use to create citations when compiling metadata, ordata about datasets.
It follows the recommendations of a GBIF task group,
which called for consistent mechanisms for ‘deep data
citation’, enabling all relevant information about adataset to be included in a single citation.

GBIF data index jumps 13% in April-May
The latest ‘rollovers’ of data in the GBIF index –the regular refreshing of data made available bypublishers – saw a very steep increase in the numberof records. More than 40m records were added,
taking the total to over 367m accessible through thedata portal at the end of May. A large proportionof this increase was accounted for by amateur birdobservations published via eBird and by new records
from Australia (see next section).

NEW DATA
Australia
Birdlife Australia (previously known as Birds
Australia) has published 2.71 million records fromits First Bird Atlas database (http://data.gbif.org/
datasets/resource/14103), which includes birdobservation data collected between 1977 and1981. Nearly 750,000 records were also publishedfrom the Historical Bird Atlas, which contains datafrom museum collections, personal notebooks,
and published and unpublished literature ranging
from 1629 to 1976. (http://data.gbif.org/datasets/
resource/14107).

The intention is to increase awareness of the tools
and protocols available to publish biodiversity datacollected as part of local government planning
processes, which are often lost after completionof reports or collected in inconsistent formats thatcannot be easily archived or shared. A concise versionof the guide is also available for local government
practitioners.
Read the full story…

GBIF guide for citing biodiversity data
New citation guidelines should increase incentives tomake biodiversity data universally available online via
the GBIF network. The recommendations enable due
recognition to be given to all those involved in thedata publication chain, from the collector in the field
to curators and programmers.

The Atlas of Living Australia has published 2,845
records from its citizen science portal, which invites
the public to submit sightings (http://data.gbif.org/
datasets/resource/14119).

United States
eBird, an online bird checklist programme developedby the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon, haspublished more than 31 million additional observation
records in its latest update, nearly doubling therecords previously accessible through GBIF. eBird
has also taken steps to ensure that data have beenvalidated by expert reviewers, thus enhancing quality.
The primary goal of eBird is to increase access to thevast numbers of bird observation data gathered bycitizens around the world each year, acting as a sourceof information on bird abundance and distribution at
various spatial and temporal scales. http://data.gbif.
org/datasets/resource/43/33GBitsThe California Academy of Sciences published morethan 140,000 records from its invertebrate zoology
collection, including a large number of marine
invertebrates from the Bering Straits and AleutianIslands, and freshwater crustaceans collected fromthe Irrawaddy Basin in Myanmar (Burma) (http://
data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14137).
The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and
Science published over 6,000 records of small
mammals primarily from southwestern UnitedStates and Mexico (http://data.gbif.org/datasets/
resource/14136).

compete to identify the maximum number of species
at selected sites around the country. Other new
datasets from Ireland record bats (http://data.gbif.
org/datasets/resource/14089, http://data.gbif.org/
datasets/resource/14090), birds sighted during
European Seabirds at Sea (ESAS) surveys in thenortheast Atlantic from 1980 to 2003 (http://data.
gbif.org/datasets/resource/14091), bugs (http://data.
gbif.org/datasets/resource/14092), marine turtles in
Irish territorial waters up to 2005 (http://data.gbif.
org/datasets/resource/14094), and vascular plants(http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14095).

NEW PUBLISHERS
Australia

American pika (Ochotona princeps)

The University of Texas-Arlington has publishedover 100,000 records from its amphibian and reptile
research centre. The collection currently holds theworld’s largest assemblage of reptiles and amphibians
from Guatemala as well as significant holdings from
Texas, Bolivia, Cameroon, Colombia, Costa Rica,
Guyana, Honduras and Mexico (http://data.gbif.org/
datasets/resource/14139).

Denmark
DanBIF, the Danish biodiversity information facility,
has published more than half a million records from
Aarhus University’s palm transect database. The data
come from transects measuring 500m by 5m, set in
the tropical forests of central and South America, torecord individual palm trees and their growth statusfrom seedlings to adults.
http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14087

Ireland
The National Biodiversity Data Centre, which hosts
the GBIF node in Ireland, has published a numberof datasets totalling over 300,000 records. They
include more than 2,000 taxa recorded during
Ireland’s Bioblitz 2011, (http://data.gbif.org/datasets/
resource/14093) an annual event in which volunteers
44

There have been a number of new publishers from
Australia. They include:• The Queensland Department of Environment
and Resource Management with over 60,000
records of survey and nesting data for coastal andseabirds throughout Queensland (http://data.gbif.
org/datasets/resource/14105)• The Australian Institute of Marine Sciencepublished more than 6,000 records of sea corals(http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14108)• The European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Australia published over 100,000 DNA records
of 1,136 taxa (http://data.gbif.org/datasets/
resource/14109)• The Department of Environment andConservation, Western Australia, shared nearly
10,000 records of orchids (http://data.gbif.org/
datasets/resource/14110) and over 23,000
records of the flora from the Swan coastal plain insouthern Australia• The Canberra Ornithologists Group published 1.26
million records from their annual garden surveys,
which have been held since 1981 (http://data.gbif.
org/datasets/resource/14115).

CanadaThree new publishers based in Canada have shareda total of more than 200,000 records through theCanadensys data network, an initiative to help provide
better access to biodiversity information held in
biological collections. The additional collections now
publishing through the GBIF Integrated Publishing
Toolkit (IPTv2) installed by Canadensys are:
• The TRTE Herbarium, located at the Universityof Toronto at Mississauga publishing nearly
11,000 records from its collection. Although theherbarium focuses on vascular plant specimensfrom Ontario, it also houses important collections

Aug 2011

from Québec and the Canadian high Arctic.
(http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14084);• The EC Smith Herbarium, the largest herbariumin Atlantic Canada and situated at the Acadia
University in Nova Scotia, publishing over
45,000 records. (http://data.gbif.org/datasets/
resource/14027); and• The University of British Columbia Herbarium,
which hosts the world’s largest collection ofvascular plants from British Columbia, publishingover 157,000 records through Canadensys (http://
data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14036).

no 28 May 2012

The ALA project reflects a major objective of GBIF: toenable countries to better understand and manage
their own biodiversity by enabling free access to data
hosted elsewhere, thus unlocking knowledge arisingfrom centuries of specimen collection and natureobservation.
Another new development on the ALA site is a data
dashboard, which provides a quick summarized viewof available records. The dashboard can be accessedat http://dashboard.ala.org.au/.

United States
The Tall Timbers Research Station and Land
Conservancy has published almost 4,000 records ofbird observations from Leon county, Florida (http://
data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/14140).

Costa Rica
The Organization of Tropical Studies (OTS), haspublished over 7,000 observation records from its Las
Cruces and Palo Verde biological stations (http://data.
gbif.org/datasets/resource/14097, http://data.gbif.
org/datasets/resource/14096). The OTS is a non-profit
consortium that includes 63 universities and research
institutions from the United States, Latin America andAustralia.

GBIF COMMUNITY
Globally-hosted data integrated into
Australian national portal
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) has integrated
more than a million records of Australian biodiversity,drawn from collections published through GBIF by
institutions in other countries.
The records now exposed in the ALA national portal
are from over 300 datasets hosted in 11 countries.
They range from Australian plant records held in the
United Kingdom’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and
the Hong Kong University Herbarium; to zoological
specimens in Poland and the United States.
The integration enables users of the ALA portal to
combine the records held overseas with Australianhosted data, for use in online tools to explore andanalyse Australian biodiversity. The tools include
distribution modelling with Australian environmental
layers, data slicing to direct queries on regional data,
data quality processing, and viewing the data against
national species lists.

ALA’s new data dashboard

New data portal on Belgian flora
The Belgian Biodiversity Platform, which hosts
the GBIF node for Belgium, has developed a new
website of the country’s flora. The site gathers 23,000
checklists of vascular plants in Belgium, compiled
since 1939. Over 2.5 million observation records ofmore than 2,800 species are available on the portal,
making it a powerful tool to visualize the distributionof vascular plants in Belgium.
The IFBL website was developed by the Belgian
Biodiversity Platform, Flo.Wer, the National Botanic
Garden of Belgium and the Research Institute for
Nature and Forest (INBO). Currently, the portalbrings together data from the Atlas of Belgian andLuxembourg Flora, and from Florabank, a database of
the wild flora of Flanders and the Brussels region, andit will be updated every month.
The Florabank1 database has been described in a newdata paper, based on a GBIF metadata document, andpublished in the open access journal PhytoKeys.
Institutions dealing with data on vascular plants
in Belgium may contact Nicolas Noé (n.noe@
biodiversity.be) to publish their data through the IFBL
data portal.

55

GBitsRepository for Antarctic genomic data
under development
The Antarctic Biodiversity Information Facility(AntaBIF), funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office(BELSPO), is developing an information system forsharing data on the region’s microbial diversity. The
Microbial Antarctic Resource System (MARS) willallow the publishing and discovery of these molecularand metagenomic resources through the AntaBIF data
portal. Through the portal, scientists will have a single
access point to raw and processed microbial diversity
information, including next generation sequencing
data.
A workshop organized by AntaBIF from 7-11 May
brought together microbiologists, IT specialists andexperts in biodiversity informatics to understandwhat would be needed from the MARS system,and to design an initial workflow and development
plan. To avoid duplication of efforts, discussions at
the workshop built on the informatics standards
developed at the GBIF-led workshop in Oxford
for recording gene-sequence descriptions, held in
February 2012.
A white paper on MARS will be circulated in the near
future.
AntaBIF has also published a data paper on Antarctic
starfish (Echinodermata, Asteroidea) from the
ANDEEP3 expedition (see http://www.pensoft.net/
journals/zookeys/article/3078/antarctic-starfishechinodermata-asteroidea-from-the-andeep3expedition).

First ever Costa Rican BioBlitz organized
The National Biodiversity Institute (INBio), whichhosts the GBIF node in Costa Rica, organized thefirst ever BioBlitz in the country on 26 and 27 May.
The BioBlitz was held at the INBioparque, created by
INBIO in 2000 to help citizens learn about Costa Rica’s
nature.
Amont 206 species reported during the event was aLong-tailed Manakin (Chiroxiphia linearis), not sighted
in the area before. INBio experts are also investigating
a find of an umbrella-shaped mushroom of the
Tricholomataceae family as a possible new fungal
species for Costa Rica.
A new citizen science portal, Bioexplorador, waslaunched in conjunction with the BioBlitz. The portal
was funded by the Costa Rican National Council for
Science and Technology (CONICIT), and uses opensource software provided by iNaturalist, whose citizen
science observations are published through GBIF.

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Portal on Chilean biodiversity created
GBIF Chile has developed a portal on the country’s
biodiversity, currently providing access to more than
19,000 records published by Chilean institutions via
the GBIF network. Among the main data publishers
are the National Museum of Natural History and the
University of La Serena.
The development of the portal was a result of amentoring project between GBIF Chile and INBio in
Costa Rica.
The portal can be accessed at http://gbif-chile.mma.
gob.cl/portal/welcome.htm.

Inventory of Ireland’s biodiversity
launched
Ireland’s National Biodiversity Data Centre (NBDC),
host of the national GBIF node, has launched the firstfull inventory of Ireland’s biodiversity.
State of Knowledge, Ireland’s Biodiversity 2010
found that there were over 31,000 known species
in Ireland, some 60% of them invertebrates and just
10% accounted for by plants and vertebrate species
combined. In the report, scientists also estimated that
there are at least 7,000 species of algae and fungi thatare yet to be discovered in Ireland. Key knowledge
gaps identified in the report have been highlighted by
the NBDC as priorities for research over the next two
years.
The full report is available at http://biodiversity.
biodiversityireland.ie/

GBIF PARTNERS
EOL reaches one million species pages
milestone
GBIF partner Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), launched in
2007, now has over a million pages of content. The
latest information published on the site comes fromthe Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of
Natural History (NMNH).

New project manager at OBISThe Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS),
one of the largest data publishers through GBIF,
has a new manager, Ward Appeltans. “Continued
collaboration with GBIF remains one of our priorities,’
Appeltans commented following his appointment.
OBIS is now part of the Intergovernmental
Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, underits International Oceanographic Data and Information
Exchange (IODE) programme.

Aug 2011

GBIF APPLICATIONS
Map of Life launches demo site
A demonstration version of the Map of Life, aninteractive site that provides information on species
distributions, was launched in May. The site currently
enables users to generate species lists for vertebrates
in any land area, based on some 150 million
occurrence records published through GBIF, as well
as expert range maps from the International Union
for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and regional
checklists from the Worldwide Fund for Nature(WWF).
The eventual aim of the project, partially funded by
the National Science Foundation, is to be a platform
for species distribution map development, providing a
set of tools for querying, accessing, downloading andsummarizing them.
The Map of Life can be accessed at http://www.
mappinglife.org/

Phone app for wildlife sightings uses
GBIF-mediated data
A smartphone application, which derives informationfrom the GBIF portal and enables users to identify
and report wildlife sightings now has over 40,000
registered users. The anymals+plants app for Android
was launched late last year with support from theGerman Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
The application allows users to record observations
worldwide and submit accurate locations by using thesmartphone’s GPS/GSM device. The records can beaccessed on the website http://www.anymals.org/
and in the future will be published through the GBIF
network.
About 5,200 sightings have been uploaded to the
web database since the launch of the application in
November 2011. Every day, over 500 users download
lists of species in a given set of coordinates, and morethan 1,000 searches are initiated. Submitted sightings
are vetted on the website by registered users.

no 28 May 2012

For more information, see http://www.anymals.org/
or contact Daniel Zitterbart (daniel.p.zitterbart@
physik.uni-erlangen.de).

TRAINING AND CAPACITYBUILDING
New training videos available
A set of 17 videos from the training course on
persistent identifiers, held in February this year, is
now available on GBIF Spain’s website at http://www.
gbif.es/videos/videos_in.php.
Also available online are 12 training videos, producedby the GBIF Secretariat, that introduce biodiversity
data publishers to issues of quality and fitness for use.
Trainers Laura Russell from VertNet and Meherzad
Romer from NatureServe Canada present topics suchas producing metadata, the quality of taxonomic andspatial data, and methods of managing data quality.
The videos can be accessed via Vimeo at vimeo.com/
album/1904479.

Tanzanian capacity building project
comes to a close
Achievements of the multi-year pilot project to build
in-country capacity in accessing and using Tanzanian
biodiversity data were showcased at a closing
ceremony, held in Dar es Salaam on 22 May, theInternational Day for Biological Diversity. The Danish
government financed the project through the GBIF
Capacity Enhancement Programme for Developing
Countries (CEPDEC).
Outputs presented at the event included the portalof the Tanzanian Biodiversity Information Facility(TanBIF), a decision-making tool based on the opensource Quantum-GIS software, and a checklist of
Tanzanian species.

The anymals+plants application is available in English
and German, and it is expected to be available in
Portuguese and Spanish in the near future.
The app can be downloaded from https://play.
google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.anymals.
anymallog&feature=search_result
Anymals+plants can be tested at the Flora’s treasures
exhibition, which runs until February 2013 at the
Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin,
one of the eight GBIF nodes in Germany.

The Vice President of Tanzania, Mohammed
Gharib Bilal (pictured above), and the Minister forCommunication, Science and Technology, Makame
Mnyaa Mbarawa were among the guests at theclosing ceremony.

7

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GBitsIn association with the closing ceremony, experts helda workshop to verify data for catalogues of priority
species, and the TanBIF Governing Board met.

OPPORTUNITIESCall for proposals for digitization projects
GBIF France is calling for proposals for digitization ofnatural history collections, creation of taxonomic lists
or similar projects to capture data to be publishedthrough the GBIF network. Projects on analysis anduse of GBIF-mediated data can also be submitted.
A total of €40,000 is available, and projects will befinanced up to a maximum of €5,000 each.
For 2012, priority will be given to projects related to
freshwater biodiversity, contributing to the EU-funded
BioFresh project; and to multimedia biodiversity data,
contributing to the EU-funded OpenUp project.
The call is open to all French institutions. The deadline
for application is 22 June. Selected projects will
receive funding in July.
Proposals may be sent to appel2012_gbif@gbif.fr.
For more information, please contact:
Anne-Sophie Archambeau
GBIF France
archambeau@gbif.fr

UPCOMING EVENTS
2012 Biodiversity Information
Management Forum
Cape Town, South Africa, 11-15 June 2012
The South African National Biodiversity Institute(SANBI), host of the GBIF national node, is organizing
the 2012 Biodiversity Information Management
Forum (BIMF) from 11 to 15 June at Kirstenbosch inCape Town.
The two core forum days are on 12 and 13 Junewith associated workshops, training and field trips
throughout the week.
More information and registration documents...

Rio+20, United Nations Conference on
Sustainable Development
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20-22 June 2012
More information....

GBIC 2012, Global Biodiversity
Informatics Conference
Copenhagen, Denmark, 2-4 July 2012
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 Ø
Denmark

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

http://www.gbif.org/
88GBits archive: http://www.gbif.org/communications/
resources/newsletters/