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GBIF is seeking input from taxonomists, curators, observational data providers, data user groups and other interested parties to facilitate the development of a unified and comprehensive plan for prioritising the GBIF digitisation (DIGIT) and electronic names cataloguing (ECAT) efforts. GBIF welcomes your insights about which taxonomic groups, thematic groups or regional floras/faunas should be priorities for the seed money awards made as part of the 2007 - 2008 GBIF Work Programme.
To solicit this input, simultaneous discussions of priorities for DIGIT and for ECAT will be carried out via e-conferences from 10 April through 24 April, 2007. These e-conferences will address priority-setting for the GBIF seed money awards that are part of GBIF's Content Theme, which includes both the DIGIT and ECAT work programmes.
The goal is to select priorities that will result in quality data sets that are rich enough and have enough geographic coverage to demonstrate to the scientific community, to politicians and to funding agencies the value of global efforts to digitize primary species occurrence data and to develop comprehensive taxonomic authority files.
The GBIF Content thematic area of work concentrates on facilitating the expansion of biodiversity knowledge by working with
- natural history collections and observational data communities to promote the digitization and dynamic accessibility of species occurrence data (DIGIT), as well as
- organisations such as the Catalogue of Life partnership, uBio, nomenclators such as IPNI and BIOSIS, and developers of regional checklists to incorporate scientific names data into a comprehensive electronic catalogue of the Earth's biota (ECAT).
To date, GBIF has provided nearly USD 4 million in seed-money awards. These funds have generally targeted projects with a high probability of success and that could be rapidly implemented. Of course, the data that have resulted from such an approach provide depth of coverage in certain areas, but the breadth of coverage still has gaps. For a number of reasons, it is important that criteria for which there is a clear rationale be used to select projects to be funded as the community works to fill those gaps.
GBIF invites your insights about what taxonomic groups, thematic groups or regional floras / faunas should be priorities for the 2007 - 2008 GBIF seed money awards.
Participation in either or both of the e-conferences is open to all interested parties. In order to participate, you must register. Please see the link(s) to the registration page(s) in the introductions to the Names Data e-Conference and/or the Occurrence Data e-Conference, below.
GBIF is preparing to announce a Request for Proposals for seed-money projects. The GBIF Governing Board has decided that the seed money funds for 2007 and 2008 should be combined, and allocated during a single proposal process.
As part of the 2007-2008 GBIF Work Programme (http://www.gbif.org/GBIF_org/wp/wp2007_2008) budget, funds have been set aside for seed money awards, intended to stimulate rapid progress in making biodiversity data (occurrences and names) available via the Internet, in support of the general GBIF Work Programme.
GBIF Participants have indicated to the Governing Board that GBIF needs more depth in areas that will be of use in larger-scale, timely concerns, such as the biodiversity Conventions or issues of high economic and/or political visibility.
In the past call, identified priorities included:
- The International Pollinators Initiative (IPI)
- The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC)
- Invasive Alien Species, and
- Indicator species in support of The Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) 2010 Biodiversity Target.
These topics could still form the basis of prioritization. However, others such as, but not limited to, the following could also be considered:
- Health/Disease (e.g., Disease Vectors)
- Biodiversity Indicators of Global Warming, or
- Critical gaps in current GBIF data coverage.
Justification for any theme chosen must include the identifcation of benefits to a clearly defined user group. Additional criteria might be (but need not be limited to):
- identification of large high quality data sets that could be made available with relatively small levels of funding, or
- identification of certain data sets that if they were made available would leverage funds to either
- make additional data available or
- support the analysis and interpretation of the newly released data
Another important question specifically with regard to names data is: Should
GBIF prioritise the increase of taxonomic coverage where there are currently gaps in ECAT for groups for which GBIF mediates a sizeable amount of species occurrence data? That is, if GBIF has a lot of occurrence data for some family of invertebrates, but does not have good names data coverage for that family, should it be a priority to acquire such data?
In order to make this prioritisation process as transparent and thorough as possible, and in order to achieve the widest possible input, GBIF wants to involve the broadest possible biodiversity community, including GBIF stakeholders. The GBIF Secretariat is doing this by hosting an e-conference to discuss possible priorities for the seed money programme for 2007 and 2008.
To register for the e-conference on names data (ECAT), please visit the web site at http://lists.gbif.org/mailman/listinfo/ecat-ec.
GBIF is preparing to announce a Request for Proposals for seed-money projects. The GBIF Governing Board has decided that the seed money funds for 2007 and 2008 should be combined, and allocated during a single proposal process.
As part of the 2007-2008 GBIF Work Programme (http://www.gbif.org/GBIF_org/wp/wp2007_2008) budget, funds have been set aside for seed money awards, intended to stimulate rapid progress in making biodiversity data (occurrences and names) available via the Internet, in support of the general GBIF Work Programme.
GBIF Participants have indicated to the Governing Board that GBIF needs more depth in areas that will be of use in larger-scale, timely concerns, such as the biodiversity Conventions or issues of high economic and/or political visibility.
In the past call, identified priorities included:
- The International Pollinators Initiative (IPI)
- The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC)
- Invasive Alien Species, and
- Indicator species in support of The Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) 2010 Biodiversity Target.
These topics could still form the basis of prioritization. However, others such as, but not limited to, the following could also be considered:
- Health/Disease (e.g., Disease Vectors)
- Biodiversity Indicators of Global Warming, or
- Critical gaps in current GBIF data coverage.
Justification for any theme chosen must include the identifcation of benefits to a clearly defined user group. Additional criteria might be (but need not be limited to):
- identification of large high quality data sets that could be made available with relatively small levels of funding, or
- identification of certain data sets that if they were made available would leverage funds to either
- make additional data available or
- support the analysis and interpretation of the newly released data
In order to make this prioritisation process as transparent and thorough as possible, and in order to achieve the widest possible input, GBIF wants to involve the broadest possible biodiversity community, including GBIF stakeholders. The GBIF Secretariat is doing this by hosting an e-conference to discuss possible priorities for the seed money programme for 2007 and 2008.
To register for the e-conference on occurrence data (DIGIT), please visit the web site at http://lists.gbif.org/mailman/listinfo/digit-ec
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