I've uploaded all the COI barcodes in the iBOL public data dumps into GBIF. This is an update of an earlier project that uploaded a small subset. Now that dataset doi:10.15468/inygc6 has been expanded to include some 2.7 million barcodes.

The GBIF 2016 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has received 15 submissions. You can view them here: Unlike last year where the topic was completely open, for the second challenge we've narrowed the focus to "Analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data". As with last year, judging is limited to the jury (of which I'm a member), however anyone interested in biodiversity informatics can browse the submissions.

In a classic paper Boggs (1949) appealed for an “atlas of ignorance”, an honest assessment of what we know we don’t know: This is the theme of this year's GBIF Challenge: Analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data. "Gaps" can be gaps in geographic coverage, taxa group, or types of data. GBIF is looking for ways to access the nature of the gaps in the data it is aggregating from its network of contributors.

One of my frustrations with the GBIF portal is that it is hard to drill down and search in a specific area. You have to zoom in and then click for a list of occurrences in the current bounding box of the map. You can't, for example, draw a polygon such as the boundary of a protected area and search within that area.

One of GBIF's goals is to provide up to date, comprehensive data on the distribution of species. Although GBIF's taxonomy and geographic scope is global, not all species are equal, in the sense that the need for information on some species is potentially much more pressing. An example are mosquitoes of the genus Aedes , such as the species A. aegypti and A. albopictus that spread the Zika virus.

TL;DR; The Plant List is now in GBIF http://doi.org/10.15468/btkum2. Readers of this blog may recall that I've had a somewhat jaundiced view of The Plant List.

I'm continuing to play with the new version of iSpecies, seeing just how far one can get by simply grabbing JSON from various sources and mashing them up. Since the Open Tree of Life is pretty unresolved ("OMG it's full of stars") I've started to grab trees from TreeBASE and add those.

A decade ago (OMG, that can't be right, an actual decade ago) I created "iSpecies", a simple little tool to mashup a variety of data from GBIF, NCBI, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Google Scholar to create a search engine for species.

It's a nice feeling when work that one did ages ago seems relevant again. Markus Döring has been working on a new backbone classification of all the species which occur in taxonomic checklists harvested by GBIF. After building a new classification the obvious question arises "how does this compare to the previous GBIF classification?" A simple question, answering it however is a little tricky.

For those of you who, like me, weren't at the "Frontiers Of Biodiversity Informatics and Modelling Species Distributions" held at the AMNH in New York, here are the videos of the talks and panel discussion, which the organisers have kindly put up on Vimeo with the following description: