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.

Official rules: 2023 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
Entry form: 2023 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

• 22 August 2023, 2359 Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)

Eligibility

The Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, companies and their employees, and governmental agencies and their employees.

The Challenge is not open to:

• Current staff members at the GBIF Secretariat
• Individuals currently contracting directly with the GBIF Secretariat
• Members of the GBIF Science Committee
• Heads of Delegation to GBIF

Submission requirements

Entrants must complete the entry form, which provides information about the entry, including:

• Submission name/title
• Team member(s) names and affiliations
• Abstract and rationale
• Operating instructions
• Link to visuals (prototype, demo, video, screenshots, slides, etc.)
• Link(s) to submission materials on any appropriate website or repository

The judges and GBIF Secretariat staff must be able to

• access and operate or review the submission at no cost
• operate it on readily available hardware (if the submission is a stand-alone application)
• repeat any processes or routines, if the submission is a script or other automated solution

Entrants can prepare and document their entries on a repository or platform of their choosing—GitHub, Jupyter Notebook, Dryad, FigShare, Open Science Framework or their own website.

By encouraging entrants to use tools that they’re already familiar and comfortable with, we hope that anyone interested in submitting can focus squarely on questions of what, why and how—

• what the submission is
• why it matters to the GBIF communities it is intended to serve
• how it works

What should I create?

The 2023 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is deliberately open-ended, so entrants have a broad remit for creating tools and techniques that advance in open science and improve the access, utility or quality of GBIF-mediated data. Challenge submissions may be new applications, visualization methods, workflows or analyses, or they build on and extend existing tools and features.

It is expected that successful entries provide practical, pragmatic solutions for the GBIF network while advancing biodiversity informatics and biodiversity data management in relation to the GBIF strategic framework.

Criteria

A panel of expert judges from relevant scientific, informatics and technology domains will evaluate submissions based on the following criteria:

• Openness and repeatability: Are the constituent elements of the submission, like code and content, freely available and transparent? Are they appropriately licensed?
• Applicability: Does the submission have sufficient relevance and scope that the communities GBIF support can use or build it?
• Novelty Has a significant portion of the submission been developed specifically for the challenge? Submissions based largely or entirely on previously published work are not deemed to be eligible entries.

Previous Challenge winners and entries

2022	Winners
2021	Winners
2020	Winners
2019	Winners
2018	Winners
2016	Winners	All entries
2015	Winners	All entries