Encyclopedia of Life Blog

As e-Biosphere winds down, I wanted to report back on what happened, what I thought was interesting, and what my take-aways were.  The meeting had 483 participants from all over the world (42 countries!).

The set up and program were excellent, with a good diversity of speakers and perspectives.  Among my favorites were Jorge Soberon’s presentation on the need for integration across subdisciplines and fields and at varying scales. Nancy Knowlton’s presentation questioning whether we need to name biodiversity in order to study it and learn from it was probably the most controversial and thought-provoking. And Sandra Knapp’s presentation documenting the motivations and paths that the Solenum project used was informative and a great case study for how to effectively stimulate participation from a broad and diverse group of specialists.

The afternoon breakout session topics were broad and yet, interestingly, produced many common themes.  Group topics included ecology, cybertaxonomy, standards, developing countries, education, and conservation.  Common themes included a need for better standards, better metadata, simplification of contributions and involvement, and better templates. Also discussed were the importance of team building and collaboration, the key role of ecosystem services, and maintaining open access to information.

The main things that I will take away from the meeting are that there have been great advances in biodiversity informatics in the last 20 years, but there is still a long way to go. The field needs to articulate its goals better and communicate these goals with the public and policy makers in a more effective manner. Data sharing and collaboration are critically important to everyone, and major projects like EOL and GBIF need to take the lead in urging standards, creating templates and tools, and outreach.  We have a long way to go, but a great role to play.

Special thanks to the staff at the QE2 conference centre.  The facility is beautiful; bright and airy with stunning views of Westminster Abbey. Also special thanks to the organizing committee for bringing together a great group of speakers and participants.  I hope this becomes an annual thing!  A final thanks to NHM for hosting a lovely evening event (pictured above). Without them, I would not have been able to take the great photo of Jim Hanken and Sir Richard Owen below…

The Biodiversity Synthesis Center (BioSynC) is located in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Our charter goal is to generate new insight into life’s diversity, evolution, distribution and conservation. Integrating diverse information sources empowers people to generate new questions, insights and discoveries. We do this by supporting and hosting scientific meetings to explore topics in biodiversity, such as taxonomy, biogeography, phylogenetics, and bioinformatics. Meetings are proposed by the scientific community to assemble novel and complimentary groups of people addressing central questions in biodiversity. Our task is to help to recruit experts in biodiversity, computer science, and conservation to the Encyclopedia of Life, and in this way we act as a main liaison between the EOL and both the scientific and academic communities.

We are concerned not only with what goes into the EOL, but with what could potentially come out of it. The possible applications for newly pooled data made easily accessible by the EOL are numerous and multifaceted. From creating new ways to visualize the evolutionary tree on the internet, to furthering the study of underrepresented and popularly unknown species, our hope is to have impact on the scientific community contributing to the EOL, the daily lives of the greater global citizenry, and the fight to conserve biodiversity on our planet.