GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2021 (up to €20,000 in prizes)

Deadline: August 2, 2021

Applications are invited for the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge 2021. The Challenge has opened with the aim of recognizing innovative entries that leverage biodiversity data and tools from the GBIF network to advance open science.

The 2021 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is deliberately open-ended, so entrants have a broad remit for creating tools and techniques that advance in open science and improve the access, utility or quality of GBIF-mediated data. Challenge submissions may be new applications, visualization methods, workflows or analyses, or they build on and extend existing tools and features.

The Challenge honours the memory of Dr Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, an inspirational leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics and a principal founder of GBIF, who died unexpectedly just before it came into being.

Prize

• Winners will be rewarded with a total of up to €20,000 in prizes.

Eligibility

The Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, companies and their employees, and governmental agencies and their employees.

The Challenge is not open to:

• Current staff members at the GBIF Secretariat.
• Individuals currently contracting directly with the GBIF Secretariat.
• Members of the GBIF Science Committee.
• Heads of Delegation to GBIF.

Evaluation Criteria

A panel of expert judges from relevant scientific, informatics and technology domains will evaluate submissions based on the following criteria:

• Openness and repeatability: Are the constituent elements of the submission, like code and content, freely available and transparent? Are they appropriately licensed?
• Applicability: Does the submission have sufficient relevance and scope that the communities GBIF support can use or build it?
• Novelty Has a significant portion of the submission been developed specifically for the challenge? Submissions based largely or entirely on previously published work are not deemed to be eligible entries.