Videos are now online from the symposium and panel discussion, ‘Frontiers Of Biodiversity Informatics and Modelling Species Distributions’, an event convened by the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History (CBC-AMNH) and GBIF and hosted at AMNH in New York City on 4 November 2015.
The event represented the public face of a three-day working meeting for the GBIF Task Group on Data Fitness for Use in Distribution Modelling, held at the City College of New York. GBIF asked the task group to assess the state of the art in the field, to connect with the worldwide scientific and modelling communities, and to share a vision of how GBIF support them in the coming decade.
Following welcomes and introductions by Ana Porzecanski, director of the CBC-AMNH, and Jorge Soberón, the task group chair, three presenters took the stage:
-
Miguel Araújo, ‘From Models of Species Distributions to Models of Communities’
-
Antoine Guisan, ‘Data for Models and Models for Data: Toward a Mutual Benefit?’
-
Townsend Peterson, ‘Game Over Before It Starts: Data Leakage as a Major Impediment in Niche and Distribution Modeling’
Joined by Soberón and fellow task group members Enrique Martinez-Meyer, Robert Anderson and Jorge Lobo, the speakers then engaged in a panel discussion on 'Frontiers of Biodiversity Informatics and Modelling Species Distributions'. Mary Blair, Matthew Aiello-Lammens, and Beth Gerstner moderated questions for the panel from online viewers.
The symposium and panel succeeded in bringing together a broad global audience of students and scientists to exchange ideas and visions on emerging frontiers of biodiversity informatics. The GBIF task group will draw on inputs from the symposium and from a web survey of experts to prepare its report, which will be open for consultation and feedback at GBIF.org.
