US Collections Records Top 63M
NBII welcomes the recent addition of the Oregon State University Herbarium, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Paleobiology Database, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, the University of California Davis, and the University of Texas at El Paso, contributing a combined 900K records to the GBIF network.
What is GBIF?:
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a coordinated international scientific effort to enable users throughout the world to discover and put to use vast quantities of global biodiversity data, thereby advancing scientific research in many disciplines, promoting technological and sustainable development, facilitating the equitable sharing of the benefits of biodiversity, and enhancing the quality of life of members of society.
GBIF News:
GBIF Survey on Custodianship of Sensitive Data Underway: The GBIF Secretariat invites representatives of all institutions that hold Primary Species Occurrence Data to complete a survey about institutional approaches to to obscuring or generalizing species data. The GBIF network and GBIF Data Portal will make cooperators' data visible, and GBIF hopes to review current approaches and develop best practices for sharing of sensitive data. The survey will be open through 1 April 2006.
GBIF recently honored Dr. John Wieczorek of the University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology with its 2006 Ebbe Nielsen Prize, awarded yearly to a promising researcher, usually in the early stage of his/her career, who is combining biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in an exciting and novel way. The prize was established to honor the memory of Dr. Nielsen, an inspirational leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics. The official award annoucement is available through the main GBIF Web site.
