The award honours the memory of Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, who was an inspirational leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics, and ‘founder-in-chief’ of GBIF.

This year’s prize was awarded to Dr. Vince Stuart Smith, a British cyber-taxonomist from the British Natural History Museum in London.

The GBIF Science Committee was impressed with the overall merit of the applications, and particularly so with the work of the winner, noting that “Dr. Smith is one of the architects of our cybertaxonomy future. Through his work he has been able to successfully and innovatively integrate his broad background in systematics and his keen interest in using the web as a tool for science communication. In addition to other important Biodiversity Informatics work, the key innovation for which Dr. Smith is being recognised is that of ‘Scratchpads’" (http://scratchpads.eu/).

Dr. Smith’s presentation “Small pieces loosely joined – a unified theory of biodiversity for the web” can be downloaded from: http://www2.gbif.org/ENP2008_Smith.pdf