News Release

Awards target novel research on species distributions

GBIF Ebbe Nielsen prize and Young Researchers Award honor scientists exploring interactions between climate, ecology and evolution

Grant and Award Announcement

Global Biodiversity Information Facility

This year's €30,000 Ebbe Nielsen Prize should contribute to better understanding of how plants respond to climate change, following the selection of Nathan Swenson in the United States to receive the prestigious annual award funded by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

The decision was made by the GBIF Science Committee, which also chose a PhD student from Argentina and a master's student from Colombia to receive the 2012 Young Researchers Award, for promising work on biogeography and species distributions.

The Ebbe Nielsen Prize, named in memory of the Danish scientist whose work helped to inspire GBIF and who died shortly before its establishment in 2001, is awarded annually to researchers in early stages of their career, who combine biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in novel ways.

The 2012 winner, Nathan Swenson, is associate professor at the Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University. His work demonstrates how occurrence data such as those available through GBIF can help understand the impact of climate on species distributions.

Swenson proposes to use the award towards a project that uses data published through GBIF, and data from the iPlant Tree of Life programme , for a large-scale analysis to study the evolution of climatic niches in plants. The analysis will be carried out jointly with the Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity Group at the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Denmark.

In a statement submitted during his nomination, Swenson says: "We could quantify for the first time how quickly or slowly climatic niches evolve in seed plants. The findings would have direct implications for our understanding of how plants may or may not respond to temporal changes in global climate."

Speaking about Swenson's selection, the chair of the GBIF Science Committee, Leonard Krishtalka, said, "The GBIF Science Committee recognized Swenson's innovative research and informatics tools that deploy biodiversity data––the kind provided globally by GBIF––to better understand the interaction between climate dynamics and complex ecological and evolutionary mechanisms. Ultimately, his work serves science and society, and advances biodiversity informatics to inform environmental analyses and policy."

Two biogeographers were selected to receive the €4,000 Young Researchers Award, presented annually to biodiversity informatics students enrolled in a master's or doctoral programme at universities in countries which are GBIF Participants.

Salvador Arias, a PhD student at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in Argentina, developed the Vicariance Inference Programme (VIP), which uses georeferenced data to explore the splitting of the geographical ranges of groups of organisms because of barriers to gene flow or species movement. Arias plans to process GBIF-mediated data through the VIP to formulate hypotheses on how species distributions have changed over time.

Elkin Tenorio Moreno is a master's student at the Department of Biological Sciences, Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. He plans to use the award to analyse dispersal patterns of Amazonian and Andean birds across climatic and geographic barriers, generating climatic niche models for over 500 bird species using GBIF-mediated data from natural history collections.

Leonard Krishtalka added, "Salvador Arias' and Elkin Tenorio's investigations embody the innovation and originality called for in the GBIF Young Researchers Award. Arias' doctoral research project will affect biodiversity science worldwide in developing an analytical tool for modelling the spatial distribution of animals and plants using GBIF-served biodiversity data. Tenorio, the first master's student to receive the YRA, will investigate how the dispersal ability of birds affects their numbers of species and evolutionary potential."

The GBIF Science Committee also selected a master's student at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Bujiku Kipondya, for a seed grant. Kipondya plans to use data published through GBIF to determine the distribution of dung beetle species along the Pare mountains in northeast Tanzania. Beetle species occurrences not currently published to the GBIF network will be added through the Tanzanian Biodiversity Information Facility (TanBIF) portal.

"Bujiku Kipondya's project is novel and important for understanding Tanzanian biodiversity and ecosystem function," Leonard Krishtalka commented on Kipondya's planned research. "He will study how the species diversity and biology of an ecologically critical group of beetles changes up and down the forested slopes of the North and South Pare Mountains. The biodiversity data gathered will be made available worldwide through GBIF."

###

For more information please contact:
Tim Hirsch
GBIF Secretariat
thirsch@gbif.org


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.