Dr Santiago Velazco and colleagues win 2022 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge prize for their R package `bcd`

COGS Affiliate Dr Santiago Velazco and his colleagues are 2022 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge prize winners for their R package bcd – a toolkit for standardizing, integrating and cleaning biodiversity data. Integrating and cleaning spatially referenced biodiversity data is a critical challenge in Species Distribution Modeling, and GBIF is a major source of global biodiversity data!

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth. It currently hosts over 2 billion species records and is constantly growing. These collaborators have developed an open-source software package for R, the most prevalent software environment used to access and work with GBIF-mediated data.

See their paper: Ribeiro BR, Velazco SJ, Guidoni-Martins K, Tessarolo G, Jardim L, Bachman SP & Loyola R (2022) bdc: A toolkit for standardizing, integrating and cleaning biodiversity data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13: 1421-1428. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13868