We are excited to announce that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Museum of Nature will host the 2017 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference in Ottawa, Canada, Oct. 1 - Oct. 6. Standards for the description and exchange of biodiversity information help promote research, support decision-making for conservation and planning, and provide a means of communicating observations across taxa, sub-disciplines, and political boundaries. The annual TDWG conference serves two purposes: it is is a forum for extending, refining, and developing standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and it is a showcase for biodiversity informatics - much of which relies on the specifications provided by TDWG and other standards organizations. Our theme this year is Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments. Associating genotypes with phenotypes has been the subject of previous TDWG symposia, and remains one of the great ongoing challenges of biodiversity science. It is complicated by our increased (but still nascent) understanding of the role played by microbiomes in phenotype expression. (As Bob Robbins pointed out in his 2012 keynote, some microbial genes, due to inter-species horizontal gene transfer, are better understood as attributes of a particular ecosystem than of a particular species.) Meanwhile, "habitat" remains one of the most over-burdened of Darwin Core terms, conflating climate, geology, taxonomic association, and other environmental variables. Our theme is intended to provoke discussion around questions such as: Can current systems, methods, and schemas be used to capture and understand patterns of association amongst occurrences, genes, phenotypes, and environments? If so, how? If not, what gaps need to be filled? ... [Information of the supplier]
Welcome to Online Taxonomic Keys, a joint project of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Royal BC Museum. This project seeks to facilitate the development of, and make readily available, a variety of regional and global identification keys in a format that is concise and easy to use. The information presented is compiled from published and unpublished works from taxonomic specialists worldwide. Taxonomic keys are important tools used by scientists and other investigators to identify specific organisms based on defining characteristics. Up until the last decade, these keys were most often published as dichotomous keys, in which specimens are identified by choosing from a progressive series of pairs of options until a solution is reached. While dichotomous keys are still universally used, the online arena provides the opportunity to design and use keys based on a character matrix. The identification keys on this site are based on a character matrix format. Specimens may be identified by selecting one or more character states (columns) for each character (rows). As selections are made a list of possible species identifications will appear at the bottom of the matrix. Clicking on the species name opens an information sheet with more information to help you understand the specimen you’ve identified. This library of identification keys is a work in progress, and will grow and expand as new keys become available. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Scientific Organizing Committee is pleased to announce that the 6th International Barcode of Life Conference will be held from August 18 – 21, 2015 at the University of Guelph, one of Canada’s major life science universities. Guelph couples easy access to a major airport with the simple logistics of a small Canadian city, ensuring that conference participants will be able to focus on science. Since 2003, DNA barcoding has become the largest research program in biodiversity science, one examining all eukaryote kingdoms and spanning many nations. Reflecting the scope of the program, numerous major international collaborative projects are underway. The 6th Conference will sustain traditions established by the five earlier conferences; it will showcase the latest scientific achievements and socio-economic implications of work conducted by the DNA barcode research community. The theme of the 6th Conference, Barcodes to Biomes, signals the ongoing expansion of our community’s research agenda from studies on particular sets of species in particular places to work which is creating the capability to examine entire biotic assembles at local and global scales. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Seventh International Biocuration Conference will be held at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, from April 6-9, 2014. Hosted by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, this meeting will provide a forum for curators and developers of biological databases to discuss their work, promote collaboration and foster a sense of community in this very active and growing area of research. Participants from academia, government and industry interested in the methods and tools employed in curation of biological and medical data are encouraged to attend. ... [Information of the supplier]
