2024 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge seeks open-data innovations for biodiversity

The call for entries for the 2024 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is now open!

The Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, GBIF’s annual incentive competition, has opened the call with the aim of recognizing innovative tools, both new and existing, that leverage biodiversity data from the GBIF network to advance open science in support of research and policy. An expert jury will judge entries on their relevance, novelty and quality to select a pool of winners to share a prize pool of up to €20,000.

Between now and 14 August 2024, individuals and teams can prepare tools and techniques that improve the access, quality and usefulness of open biodiversity data by submitting them to this open-ended competition.

Entrants may submit tools and techniques for use in biodiversity-related research and decision-making that they develop or improve to respond to the Challenge. Entries may build new tools or extend the capabilities of existing ones with new features. Entrants can explore a suite of dozens of previous Challenge winners to inspire ideas, topics and approaches worth pursuing.

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

Winners will be announced in late September or early October 2024 at the 31st GBIF Governing Board meeting in Portugal.

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 suddenly just before it came into being.

Official rules: 2024 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge

Entry form: 2024 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge

The following summary of rules and requirements does not replace or supercede the official rules. Send questions or requests for clarifications to ENChallenge@gbif.org.

Submission deadline

- 14 August 2024, 2359 Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)