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Story: GBIF Science Symposium 2003
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Dr. Cristián Samper will be the keynote speaker for the Symposium. Other speakers include Drs. Jorge Soberón, Takeshi Sagara, Carsten Rahbek, and Craig Moritz.
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| Released on: |
24 March 2003 |
| Contributor: |
Meredith Lane |
| Language: |
English |
Spatial coverage: |
Not applicable |
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2003 GBIF Science Symposium
2 May 2003, 0800 – 1700
København Universitet Alexandersalen
Bispetorvet, København
Founding the Future:
On the Rock of Real Data or the Sands of Speculation?
This GBIF Symposium is about the advantages of basing management decisions
and scientific opinion on real data in digital form. It will be introduced
from a global, scientific and political perspective by a visionary scientist-politician,
Dr. Cristián Samper.
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) was established in 2001
to take on a unique task: To make it possible for policy- and decision-makers,
research scientists and the general public—worldwide—to electronically access
the world’s supply of primary scientific data on biodiversity. These data
are based on actual specimens in natural history collections, and when correlated
with geographical data, provide robust answers to policy, management and scientific
questions.
On the world stage, most players have become more and more concerned about
the endangerment of the ecological and economically important services provided
to humanity by biodiversity. Those concerns have led to the Convention on
Biological Diversity and its Clearing House Mechanism for information on biodiversity
policy, to the UN’s Man and the Biosphere project, to the DIVERSITAS consortium
led by the International Union of Biological Scientists, and to many other
efforts at “conservation through information” led by governmental and nongovernmental
organizations around the world.
Within this panoply of organizations, many have been tasked to develop analyses
of the status of biodiversity and ecological function, others to advise international
governmental bodies on how to balance the needs of humans with those of the
preservation of biodiversity, and still others with properly managing and
studying such pristine ecological preserves as remain on the planet. All have
done their best to present factual information, but most have relied on secondary
sources as the basis for their reports. Worse, some of these reports have
been based only on speculative evaluations provided by consultants.
Even with all the calls for information on which to base decisions, the
richest source of scientific information about biodiversity—the world’s natural
history collections and the associated library materials—has remained essentially
untapped. Even research scientists who study biodiversity have been limited
in their ability to understand its complexity because most of the data are
not digital.
This symposium is designed to demonstrate the power of digital natural history
specimen data, to show how important it is that GBIF continue its efforts
to encourage digitisation and equitable sharing of these data.
Speakers in the 2003 GBIF Science Symposium
The Symposium will be introduced by Dr. Cristián Samper, recently
appointed Director of the U.S. National Natural History Museum (part of the
Smithsonian Institution), who started and served as the first Director of
the Alexander von Humboldt Institute in Bogotá, Colombia.
He has also served as the Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific, Technical
and Technological Advice of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Dr. Samper is well known as a visionary leader, skilled negotiator and inspiring
speaker; he will address the title of the whole symposium.
Dr. Jorge Soberón, Head of Delegation from Mexico to the GBIF
Governing Board and Executive Secretary of the Consejo Nacional de la Biodiversidad
(CONABIO). The research that Dr. Soberón and his colleagues conduct
illustrates the vital role of specimen data in conservation biology, in land
use policy, and in the process of addressing the challenges of global change.
His title for this symposium talk is Occurrence, occupancy and niches: The
power of specimen data.
Dr. Takeshi Sagara, of the Center for Information Science of the
University of Tokyo, is a well known computer scientist who has developed
gazetteers and tools that allow ambiguous geographical name searches, which
has been extremely useful to the elucidation of species distributions. These
tools help overcome one of the possible shortcomings of specimen data. His
talk will be Cleaning and adding value to inaccurate geographical descriptions
on specimen labels.
The uses to which readily available biodiversity information can be put
in pure research also will be addressed. Dr. Craig Moritz, Director
of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Professor of Integrative Biology
at the University of California at Berkeley, has been invited to speak on
his research, which combines information from surveys of molecular variation
with data on demography and current or historical distributions to infer population
processes—the basic sources of biodiversity—in space and time. The
title of his symposium speech is Biodiversity informatics and conservation
of pattern and process.
Dr. Carsten Rahbek, of the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen University,
will also demonstrate research uses for biodiversity data such as that which
GBIF will provide. At the same time he will sound a cautionary note about
the suitability of certain datasets for addressing particular problems. Dr.
Rahbek’s work is tightly linked with direct applications to conservation biology
in Africa. For this symposium, his title will be Use of large quantitative
distribution databases in biogeography and conservation research.
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Please note that this story expired on 2003/05/05
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