There is a world of tools, standards and data out there, ready for you to use.

"Biodiversity Informatics" deals with the application of informatics techniques to biodiversity information for improved management, presentation, discovery, exploration and analysis of scientific data. Combined with open data sources on the Internet, this is a powerful new approach in doing research.

Bringing these tools and data to scientists, citizen scientists or open data adepts is one of the task of the Belgian Biodiversity Platform. To achieve this goal we decided to organize the "Empowering Biodiversity Research" conference on May 21th in Brussels 2015.

During this conference, we will like to take you on a tour to the world of biodiversity informatics & open data. Several interesting projects will be highlighted, for example, you will get to know the whereabouts of Eric the seagull, a dataset published as open data on the internet and learn how to deal with rare animal occurrences and putting them in context.

We will also look at Antartic biodiversity and find out how you could use a taxonomic backbone to improve your biodiversity data.

Antarctic Biodiversity Portal

During this conference we will try to make the link between open data initiatives and freely available biodiversity data on the internet. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is the worlds biggest aggregator of data when it comes to this type of data. We hope to realise some fruitful discussions with interested persons coming from the open data community.

For more information on this conference, please visit the website. Registration deadline ends in a couple of days, on May 7th. And yes, there is a networking event foreseen.