Scratchpads are an easy to use, social networking application that enable communities of researchers to manage, share and publish taxonomic data online. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered free to any scientist that completes an online registration form. Key features of the Scratchpads include tools to manage: Classifications / Phylogenies / Bibliographies / Documents / Image galleries / Custom data / Specimen records / Maps. Users control who has access to content, which is published on the site under Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license. ... [Information of the supplier]
LifeDesks are dynamic web environments that make the online management and sharing of biodiversity research easier than ever. Through them, you can shape the Encyclopedia of Life by contributing to the ongoing effort to document the world's species. [Information of the supplier]
In his blog iPhylo, the Scottish evolutionary biologist Roderic Page, a professor at the University of Glasgow, frequently writes about topics in biodiversity informatics and taxonomy. There are links to his numerous projects, such as iSpecies or BioStor. [Editorial staff vifabio]
Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) will hold its 2015 annual conference 28 September to 3 October 2015 in Nairobi, Kenya. This is TDWG’s first conference in Africa! The theme of the conference is Applications, Standards and Capacity Building for Sustaining Global Biodiversity. Subprograms will include: Digitization, Semantic Technologies, Phyloinformatics, Outreach and Collaboration, ePublications, Trait Data, and Conservation informatics. ... [Information of the supplier]
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 by both professional and citizen scientists across taxa and political boundaries. TDWG standards are an integral foundation of the largest biodiversity information sources, but given the wealth and diversity of information collected for plants, animals, and fossils, the need remains to extend and refine the concepts required to achieve greater integration for the discovery of knowledge and its use in biodiversity conservation. This year, TDWG is focusing its annual meeting not only on supporting research, decision making, and communication of biodiversity information, but also on how standards can support innovative research. Scientific innovations often "stand on the shoulders of giants," but they can also be disruptive -- causing major changes in the way that science works. To what extent do our standards promote innovation, and does the most innovative research show us where our standards need to be refined and extended? Current research both in Computer Science (e.g., deep learning, computer vision, ambient computing) and Biodiversity Sciences offers excellent opportunities for multidisciplinary innovative synergies among researchers, decision makers, students, and citizen scientists. ... [Information of the supplier]
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]
