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Story: Ebbe Nielsen Prize Winner to Make Presentation
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This event is open to the public, who are asked to PLEASE REGISTER by clicking on the "Concerned URL" below. Paul Flemons, winner of the 2007 Ebbe Nielsen Prize, will receive the award and make a presentation on his prize-winning research.
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| Released on: |
11 September 2007 |
| Contributor: |
Meredith Lane |
| Language: |
English |
Spatial coverage: |
Not applicable |
Keywords: |
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| Source of information: |
GBIF Secretariat |
| Concerned URL: |
http://www.gbif.org/Events/enp2007 |
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Mr. Paul Flemons will receive the Ebbe Nielsen Prize during a ceremony at the Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands 17 October 2007 at 5 p.m. local timeThe public are most welcome to attend, but are asked to please REGISTER.
Following the presentation of the Prize, Mr. Flemons will give a talk on his research, entitled "Reflections on a Vision". The abstract for the talk is found below.
The public is invited to both the award ceremony and the presentation that follows, but is requested to REGISTER for the event. In addition, the public is also invited to the GBIF Science Symposium, which occurs at the same venue on the following day. Separate registration for that event is also requested.
Reflections on a Vision
The Australian Museum was one of the first natural history museums in the world to appoint a full time position dedicated to the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the museum context. As the successful applicant for this position, Flemons was able to bring to the Museum a new range of skills and knowledge (GIS, species modelling and reserve planning) gleaned from many years experience in applying GIS in natural resource management and biodiversity conservation.
The combination of this new skill base and the Australian Museum's extensive biodiversity databases and taxonomic expertise meant that the Museum was able to be more directly involved in biodiversity conservation planning initiatives. This involvement served to emphasise the importance of taxonomy and specimen based data and databases. However, these data were virtually inaccessible to all but Museum scientists.
Through the use of Museum data for modelling invertebrate biodiversity distribution, the Museum was able to play a significant role in the New South Wales Regional Forestry Assessments (RFAs) in the late 1990's. At the time, all of the biodiversity informatics and analysis activities around these forestry assessments were based on desktop computing. There was no access to data, datasets or analysis tools for anyone other than agency based scientists. It was a closed shop.
As a result of these experiences, Flemons began to envision a merging of the enormous potential to provide access to distributed biodiversity data of the Internet with the types of tools and techniques that were used in the RFAs. His vision was of a time in the not too distant future when biodiversity planning activities such as the forestry assessments could be carried out online.
This vision started Flemons' journey along the road that led to the 2007 Ebbie Nielsen Prize. Along this road, Flemons developed a number of web-based GIS applications (see BioMaps and GBIFMAPA) for accessing, visualising and analysing biodiversity data. These applications represent a big step toward his vision, but there are still many challenges to overcome before the complete vision is a reality.
Flemons will talk about those challenges, GBIF 's role in meeting them, and reflect on what is required to ensure that the vision doesn't become a mirage.
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Please note that this story expired on 2007/10/18
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