The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is an annual incentive prize that seeks to inspire innovative applications of open-access biodiversity data by scientists, informaticians, data modelers, cartographers and other experts.
Congratulations to the 2024 Challenge winners! The call for submissions to the 2025 Challenge will open in December 2024 or January 2025.
Like the Ebbe Nielsen Prize it replaced, the Challenge honours the memory of Dr Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, an inspirational leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics and one of the principal founders of GBIF, who tragically died just before it came into being.
While the focus of the competition has evolved from year to year, Challenge entries manifest a variety of forms and approaches—new analytical research, richer policy-relevant visualizations, web and mobile applications, or improvements to processes around data digitization, quality and access.
Ebbe Nielsen Challenge winners
2024
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country or area |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | ChatIPT | Rukaya Johaadien | Norway |
| 2nd | Planetary Knowledge Base | Qianqian "Hiris" Gu Ben Scott Vince Smith |
United Kingdom |
| 3rd | CoreTech Assistant: Overcoming language barrier & DWC complexity | Chen Yao | Taiwan |
2023
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | GBIF Alert An open-source GBIF-based alert system for occurrences |
Nicolas Noé Peter Desmet Tim Adriaens Bram D'Hondt Lien Reyserhove Damiano Oldoni |
Belgium |
| 2nd | Frictionless Data for Bionomia | David Shorthouse | Canada |
| 3rd | Library of Identification Resources | Lars Willighagen | Netherlands |
| 3rd | Open Data Biodiversity Mapper | Sam Wenaas Perrin Philip Stanley Mostert Ron Togunov |
Norway |
2022
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | bdc A toolkit for standardizing, integrating and cleaning biodiversity data |
Bruno R. Ribeiro Santigo José Elías Velazco Karlo Guidoni-Martins Geiziane Tessarolo Lucas Jardim Steven P. Bachman Rafael Loyola |
Brazil Argentina Brazil Brazil Brazil United Kingdom Brazil |
| 1st | GridDER Grid Detection and Evaluation in R |
Xiao Feng Tainá Rocha Hanna T Thammavong Rima Tulaiha Xin Chen Yingying Xie Daniel Park |
United States United States / Brazil United States United States United States United States United States |
| 2nd | GBIF LACS GBIF Literature Abstract Classification System |
Ángel Luis Robles Fernández Nathan Upham |
United States United States |
2021
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Bio-Dem: Biodiversity knowledge & democracy |
Alexander Zizka Oskar Rydén Daniel Edler Johannes Klein Staffan Lindberg Alexandre Antonelli |
Germany Sweden Sweden Sweden Sweden United Kingdom |
| 2nd | Locating KBAs: An automated workflow for identifying potential Key Biodiversity Areas |
Daniela Linero Triana | Colombia |
| 2nd | plantR: An R package for managing species records from biological collections |
Renato A. Ferreira de Lima Andrea Sánchez-Tapia Sara R. Mortara Hans ter Steege Marinez F. de Siqueira |
Brazil Brazil Brazil Netherlands Brazil |
2020
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | ShinyBIOMOD: An R application for modelling species distribution |
Ian Ondo Alexandre Antonelli Wilfried Thuiller Maya Gueguen Samuel Pironon |
United Kingdom United Kingdom / Sweden France France United Kingdom |
| 2nd | Linking nomenclature to type specimens | Maarten Trekels | Belgium |
| 2nd | InteractIAS A Jupyter notebook to support expert risk assessment on invasive species |
Quentin Groom | South Africa |
| 3rd | DNA barcode browser | Roderic Page | United Kingdom |
| 3rd | Voyager | Ivvet Abdullah-Modinou Ben Scott |
United Kingdom United Kingdom |
| 3rd | Mass Georeferencing Tool | Luis J. Villanueva | United States |
2019
2018
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Checklist recipe A template for reproducible standardization of species checklist data |
Lien Reyserhove Damiano Oldoni Peter Desmet |
Belgium Belgium Belgium |
| 1st | Ozymandias A biodiversity knowledge graph |
Roderic D. M. Page | United Kingdom |
| 2nd | The bdverse | Tomer Gueta Yohay Carmel Vijay Barve Thiloshon Nagarajah Povilas Gibas Ashwin Agrawal |
Israel Israel United States Sri Lanka Lithuania India |
| 2nd | GBIF Issues Explorer | Luis J. Villanueva, Smithsonian Institution | United States |
| 2nd | Smart mosquito trap to DwC pipeline | Connor Howington Samuel Rund |
United States United States |
| 2nd | Taxonomy Tree Editor | Ashish Singh Tomar | Spain |
2016
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Exploring ignorance in space and time | Alejandro Ruete | Sweden |
| 2nd | sampbias | Alexander Zizka Alexandre Antonelli Daniele Silvestro, University of Gothenberg |
Sweden Sweden Sweden |
| 2nd | GBIF Coverage Assessment Tools | Walter Jetz Jeremy Malczyk Ajay Ranipeta Luis J. Villanueva Carsten Meyer Michelle Duong, Map of Life Consortium |
United States United States United States United States United States United States |
| 3rd | BioGeoBias | Laurens Gefferts | Netherlands |
| 3rd | Towards global-scale species distribution models | Aafke Schipper Jasmijn Rost Daniela Remenska Valerio Barbarossa |
Netherlands |
| 3rd | crowdgap | Jesus Orozco |
2015
| Prize | Project | Recipient(s) | Country(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | GBIF dataset metrics | Peter Desmet Bart Aelterman Nicolas Noé |
Belgium Belgium Belgium |
| 2nd | BioGUID.org | Richard Pyle | United States |
| 3rd | #myGBIF | Tom August | United Kingdom |
| 3rd | ecoSpace 2 | Miguel Porto | Portugal |
| 3rd | GBIF Soundscape | Ben Raymond Peter Neish |
Australia Australia |
| 3rd | Wallace A Web App to Harness Biodiversity Data |
Robert P. Anderson Matthew Aiello-Lammens Bob Muscarella Bruno Vilela Jamie Kass |
United States, Denmark and Spain |
Ebbe Nielsen Prize
Prior to its relaunch in 2014 as an incentive challenge, the Ebbe Nielsen Prize recognize an individual who demonstrated excellence in combining biodiversity informatics and biosystematics research.
| Year | Recipient(s) | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Tony Rees Video presentation |
Australia |
| 2013 | Miguel Bastos Araújo Video presentation |
Portugal |
| 2012 | Nathan Swenson | United States |
| 2011 | Jens-Christian Svenning | Denmark |
| 2010 | Sujeevan Ratnasingham | Canada |
| 2009 | Andy Jarvis | Colombia |
| 2008 | Vince Stuart Smith | United Kingdom |
| 2007 | Paul Flemons | Australia |
| 2006 | John Wieczorek | United States |
| 2005 | Pablo Goloboff | Argentina |
| 2004 | Johan Nilsson | Sweden |
| 2003 | Stefan Schröder | Germany |
| 2002 | Nozomi Ytow | Japan |
