2023 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge seeks open-data innovations for biodiversity

Call for entries for submissions vying for €20,000 in prizes from annual incentive competition. DEADLINE: 22 August 2023

The 2023 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has opened with the aim of recognizing innovations that leverage biodiversity data and tools from the GBIF network to advance open science. An expert jury will judge entries on their openness and repeatability, relevance and novelty and present a selected pool of winners with a total of up to €20,000 in prizes.

Between now and 22 August 2023, individuals and teams can prepare tools and techniques that improve the access, usefulness and quality of open biodiversity data and submit them to this open-ended, annual incentive competition.

Challenge entries can take any number of forms, as entrants may choose to develop new applications, visualizations, methods, workflows or analyses, often (but not always) making use of the GBIF API to access data. Entries may also build on or extend the capabilities of existing tools and features available across the GBIF network. We encourage entrants to review previous winners as well as previous winning entries for ideas, problems or approaches you may wish to pursue.

Entries should benefit multiple stakeholder groups, including data users, data holders and data managers. Entrants may also wish to review the GBIF Communications Strategy to see how GBIF characterizes its audiences.

Winners will be announced in October 2023 at the 30th GBIF Governing Board meeting in Canberra, Australia.

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.

Read about rules and requirements.