What's New

March 2006

Australian Institutions participate in GBIF Seed Money Projects GBIF has announced the funding of several major projects under its Seed Money program. Two leading Australian institutions are part of the successful multi-national consortia which were awarded these funds. The Australian Museum will help develop a georeferenced, distributed database of worldwide amphibian localities as part of an expanded HerpNET (see the Full Story) while the Australian National Herbarium will participate in developing a global working checklist of the Compositae (see The International Compositae Alliance and the Full Story). Congratulations to both groups for these significant awards.

Australians join GBIF Science Subcommittees Six Australian researchers have joined GBIF Science Subcommittees, continuing Australia's strong commitment to supporting GBIF and its goals. Paul Flemons (Australian Museum) and Amit Parashar (National Oceans Office) were successfully nominated to the Subcommittee for Data Access and Database Interoperability, Arthur Chapman (Australian Biodiversity Information Services) and Les Christidis (Australian Museum) to the Subcommittee for Digitisation of Natural History Collection Data, John La Salle (CSIRO Entomology) to the Subcommittee for Electronic Catalogue of Names of Known Organisms and Kevin Thiele (University of Queensland) to the Subcommittee for Outreach and Capacity Building. Australia now has representatives on all four of the GBIF Science Subcommittees. Congratulations to all successful nominees.

February 2006

First UNESCO Biodiversity Informatics Chair established in Australia. Professor Shoba Ranganathan of Macquarie University has been appointed to the first Chair in Biodiversity Informatics. This chair, sponsored by UNESCO, is the first of several chairs to be appointed and will give biodiversity informatics a foothold in the academic community worldwide. In addition, it is foreseen as a valuable mechanism for training individuals in developing countries in the field of biodiversity informatics. They also effectively link the academic community with the GBIF Participant NODES and provide practical technical solutions to the participant NODES.

January 2006

GBIF Supports Open Access to Scientific Data. On 16 January 2006, the GBIF Governing Board adopted a statement that recommends to research funding agencies that they promote open access to scientific biodiversity data. Read the full story or the complete Statement.

Two of the goals of GBIF are to bring together data for multiple uses, and to find incentives and mechanisms to make data freely available as quickly and effectively as possible. This Statement supports these goals.

November 2005

Taxonomic Databases Working Group Receives Funding. GBIF has received a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to assist the Taxonomic Databases Working Group to develop global biodiversity standards. Read more.

OZCAM Comes Online. ABIF is pleased to announce that OZCAM has joined the GBIF family of data providers. OZCAM is making available over 850,000 records from both vertebrate and invertebrate groups.

GBIF Demonstration Project Completed. The GBIF Demonstration Project undertaken by the Department of the Environment and Heritage has been successfully completed and presented to the GBIF Governing Board at its recent meeting in Stockholm, Sweden (see the PowerPoint presentation (7.2megs)). The project, which developed the Biodiversity Assessment Tool (BAT), was enthusiastically received with a number of countries asking if the tool could be installed in their countries. The developers of BAT, Dan Rosauer and Bryn Honeyman, as well as the entire BAT Team, are to be congratulated for doing an outstanding job.

July 2005

ABIF Receives Natural Heritage Trunst Funding. Further funding has been received from the Natural Heritage Trust in 2005/06 to continue development of the Australian Biodiversity Information Facility (ABIF). These funds will be used for a broad range of activities, including to develop a system to provide single-point access to biological specimens from across Australia's diverse flora and fauna, and to allow searching for any plant or animal name known to occur in Australia. This work will involve building tools for both humans and computers. Why computers? Because more and more, new discoveries are being made when large amounts of information are combined in new and novel ways, and computers talking directly to each other allows us to make discoveries that we might not see using more traditional methods.

ABIF Project Manager Appointed. An ABIF Project Manager, Dr. Steve Shattuck, has been appointed to oversee these developments. He is being assisted by David Levy, a software engineer, with oversight being provided by the recently formed ABIF Steering and Technical Committees (more on these committees later).

March 2005

New ABIF Dataset. The Australian Biodiversity Information Facility data provider contains a new dataset of more than 4000 Dung Beetle specimens collected on the island of New Caledonia by Dr Geoff Monteith of the Queensland Museum, South Bank, Brisbane.

The Australian Biodiversity Information Facility data provider now has over 100,000 Land Molluscs specimen records in the Land Molluscs dataset. These records are derived from Pulmonata databases from the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, Australian Museum, Queensland Museum, Museum Victoria, Queen Victoria Museum, South Australian Museum, Northern Territory Museums and Art Galleries and the Western Australian Museum.

ABIF Newsletter

June 2004

The Head of the Australian Delegation to GBIF, Dr Joanne Daly (Chief, CSIRO Entomology) has produced a newsletter to keep interested parties up-to-date with GBIF.

June 2004 newsletter (PDF – 21 KB)