Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2024 winner

The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is the most prestigious GBIF award. It is awarded for innovative applications of open-access biodiversity data by scientists, informaticians, data modelers, cartographers, and other experts. GBIF Norway Data Manager Rukaya Sarah Johaadien was awarded the 2024 award for her work on developing an AI chatbot pipeline to digitize and publish natural history specimens in GBIF. This work is a collaboration between Rukaya and GBIF Norway Data Steward Michal Torma.

See more details about the Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2024 from the GBIF home page.

The Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is an international science competition conducted annually from 2015 onwards by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), with a set of cash prizes that recognize researcher(s)' submissions in creating software or approaches that successfully address a GBIF-issued challenge in the field of biodiversity informatics. It succeeds the Ebbe Nielsen Prize, which was awarded annually by GBIF between 2002 and 2014. The name of the challenge honors the memory of prominent entomologist and biodiversity informatics proponent Ebbe Nielsen, who died of a heart attack in the USA en route to the 2001 GBIF Governing Board meeting.

Previous Ebbe Nielsen Prize winners are:

• 2002: Nozomi Ytow (Japan)
• 2003: Stefan Schröder (Germany)
• 2004: Johan Nilsson (Sweden)
• 2005: Pablo Goloboff (Argentina)
• 2006: John Wieczorek (United States)
• 2007: Paul Flemons (Australia)
• 2008: Vince Stuart Smith (United Kingdom)
• 2009: Andy Jarvis (Colombia)
• 2010: Sujeevan Ratnasingham (Canada)
• 2011: Jens-Christian Svenning (Denmark)
• 2012: Nathan Swenson (United States)
• 2013: Miguel Bastos Araújo (Portugal)
• 2014: Tony Rees (Australia)

Previous Ebbe Nielsen Challenge winners are:

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2015
  • First Prize winner: "GBIF Dataset Metrics" - Peter Desmet, Bart Aelterman, and Nicolas Noé (Belgium)

  • Second Prize winner: "BioGUID.org" - Richard Pyle (United States)

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2016

  • First Prize winner: "Exploring ignorance in space and time" - Alejandro Ruete (Argentina)

  • Joint Second Prize winners:

    • "sampbias" - Alexander Zizka, Alexandre Antonelli and Daniele Silvestro (Sweden)

    • and "GBIF Coverage Assessment Tools" - Walter Jetz, Jeremy Malczyk, Carsten Meyer, Michelle Duong, Ajay Ranipeta and Luis J. Villanueva (United States, South Africa and Germany)

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2017

  • No winners were announced.

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2018

  • Joint First Prize winners:

    • "Checklist recipe: a template for reproducible standardization of species checklist data" - Lien Reyserhove, Damiano Oldoni and Peter Desmet (Belgium)
    • "Ozymandias: a biodiversity knowledge graph" - Roderic D. M. Page (United Kingdom)

  • Joint Second Prize winners:

    • "The bdverse" - Tomer Gueta, Yohay Carmel, Vijay Barve, Thiloshon Nagarajah, Povilas Gibas, Ashwin Agrawal (Israel, United States, Sri Lanka, Lithuania and India)
    • "GBIF Issues Explorer" - Luis J. Villanueva (United States)
    • "Smart mosquito trap to DwC pipeline" - Connor Howington and Samuel Rund (United States)
    • "Taxonomy Tree Editor" - Ashish Singh Tomar (Spain)

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2019

  • First Prize winner: "WhereNext: a recommending system to identify sampling priorities based on generalized dissimilarity modeling" - Jorge Velásquez-Tibatá (Colombia)

  • Joint Second Prize winners:

    • "occCite: Tools to Enable Comprehensive Biodiversity Data Citation" - Hannah L. Owens, Cory Merow, Brian S. Maitner, Vijay V. Barve & Robert Guralnick (Denmark, United States)
    • "Organella" - Andrea Biedermann, Diana Gert, Dimitar Ruszev & Paul Roeder (Germany)

  • Joint Third Prize winners:

    • "Agile GBIF Publishing" - Evgeniy Meyke (Finland)
    • "Biodiversity Information Review and Decision Support: the BIRDS package for R" - Debora Arlt, Alejandro Ruete & Anton Hammarström (Sweden)
    • "GB Sifter: A GBIF to GenBank Data Sifter" - Luis Allende (United States)
    • "naturaList" - Arthur Vinicius Rodrigues & Gabriel Nakamura (Brazil)
    • "GeoNature-atlas: Publish an online biodiversity atlas with GBIF data of your area" - Jordan Sellies, Amandine Sahl (France)
    • "Rapid Least Concern: Automated assessments of lower risk plants for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (Red List)" - Steven Bachman, Barnaby Walker & Justin Moat (United Kingdom)

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2020

  • First Prize: ShinyBIOMOD: An R application for modelling species distribution by Ian Ondo (United Kingdom), Wilfried Thuiller & Maya Gueguen (France), Alexandre Antonelli (United Kingdom and Sweden), Samuel Pironon (United Kingdom)

  • Second Prizes:

    • Linking nomenclature to type specimens by Maarten Trekels (Belgium)

    • InteractIAS: A Jupyter notebook to support expert risk assessment on invasive species by Quentin Groom (Belgium)

  • Third Prizes:

    • DNA barcode browser by Roderic D. M. Page (United Kingdom)

    • Voyager by Ivvet Abdullah-Modinou and Ben Scott (United Kingdom)

    • Mass Georeferencing Tool by Luis J. Villanueva (USA)

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2021

  • First prize: Bio-Dem by Alexander Zizka, iDiv, Germany; Oskar Rydén, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Daniel Edler, Umeå University, Sweden; Johannes Klein, Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Staffan Lindberg, Varieties of Democracy Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Alexandre Antonelli, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom

  • Second prizes:

    • Locating KBAs, by Daniela Linero Triana, National Audubon Society, Colombia

    • plantR, by Renato A. Ferreira de Lima, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil;Andrea Sánchez-Tapia, Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sara R. Mortara, Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Hans ter Steege, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, The Netherlands; Marinez F. de Siqueira, Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2022

  • First Prizes:

    • bdc: A toolkit for standardizing, integrating and cleaning biodiversity data: Bruno R. Ribeiro (Brazil); Santiago José Elías Velazco (Argentina); Karlo Guidoni-Martins (Brazil); Geiziane Tessarolo (Brazil); Lucas Jardim (Brazil); Steven P. Bachman (United Kingdom); Rafael Loyola (Brazil)

    • GridDER: Grid Detection and Evaluation in R: Xiao Feng (United States); Tainá Rocha (Brazil); Hanna T Thammavong (United States); Rima Tulaiha (United States); Xin Chen (United States); Yingying Xie (United States); Daniel Park (United States)

  • Second Prize: 

    • GBIF LACS: GBIF Literature Abstract Classification System: Ángel Luis Robles Fernández (United States); Nathan Upham (United States)

• Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2023

  • First Prize: 

    • GBIF Alert: an open-source GBIF-based alert system for occurrences: Nicolas Noé, The Binary Forest, Belgium; Peter Desmet, Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO), Belgium; Tim Adriaens, INBO, Belgium; Bram D’Hondt, INBO, Belgium; Lien Reyserhove, INBO, Belgium; Damiano Oldoni, INBO, Belgium

  • Second Prize: 

    • Frictionless Data from Bionomia: David Shorthouse, Canada

  • Third Prizes: 

    • Library of Identification Resources: Lars Willighagen, Netherlands

    • Open Data Biodiversity Mapper: Sam Wenaas Perrin, Gjærevoll Centre, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway; Philip Stanley Mostert, Department of Mathematical Sciences, NTNU, Norway; Ron Togunov, Department of Mathematical Sciences, NTNU, Norway

• and this year, 2024:

  • First prize: ChatIPT by Rukaya Johaadien (Norway)

  • Second prize: Planetary Knowledge Base by by Qianqian (Hiris) Gu, Ben Scott and Vince Smith (United Kingdom)

  • Third prize: CoreTech Assistant by Chen Yao (Taiwan)