Community Announcements

Tell the iDigBio community about your upcoming events, projects or other items pertinent to biodiversity and biological collections.

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Two postdocs in biodiversity informatics at Arizona State

The Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center (BioKIC) at Arizona State University (ASU) invites applications for two postdoctoral research scholar positions in biodiversity informatics. The positions are part of a new Biodiversity Data Science Initiative launched at ASU and led by Beckett Sterner and Nico Franz. The initiative will develop a nextgeneration solution to overcome the performance limits of taxonomic names as fundamental categories for grouping all forms of data about living things into scientifically meaningful units. Prevalent existing solutions bundle data by names alone, without accounting for changes in their scientific meanings, which causes incorrect data packaging and decision-making. Taxonomic intelligence provides the mapping between names and concepts that is necessary to resolve names accurately into meanings despite changing relationships across time and experts. The initiative will focus on building an innovative web platform that leverages theoretical advancements and prototype software for taxonomic concept alignment, with the goal to establish a scalable taxonomic intelligence service that will carry value for scientific audiences, science publishers, government agencies, and environmental consulting firms. The platform will accelerate the growth of high-quality, reproducible biological data by driving the adoption of taxonomic intelligence metadata in scientific datasets and journals.
The position ads are available here:
Position 1: https://sols.asu.edu/sites/default/files/job_12575.pdf
Position 2: https://sols.asu.edu/sites/default/files/job_12643.pdf
Exploratory e-mail inquiries are strongly encouraged. Interested applicants should send a one-page research statement, clearly indicating their qualifications and motivation to join the project, Curriculum Vitae, and contact information for three references to nmfranz@asu.edu and beckett.sterner@asu.edu. The review of applications is rolling and will continue until a suitable candidate has been found. The start date is flexible, with a preference for January 1st, 2019.

Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences - Plant Biology at Mississippi State University

Assistant Professor Position

Department of Biological Sciences

Mississippi State University

The Department of Biological Sciences at Mississippi State University invites applicants for a 9-month, tenure-track position in Plant Biology as Assistant Professor and Curator of the Mississippi State University Herbarium.

We seek candidates with demonstrated curatorial skills who can develop an extramurally-funded research program. Applications are welcomed from candidates employing traditional or modern approaches to address fundamental questions in any area of plant biology including, but not limited to, plant taxonomy, systematics, ecology, evolution, biogeography, or conservation biology.

Responsibilities will include development and maintenance of an extramurally-funded research program, oversight and curation of a vascular plant collection (including curation of the digital collection and use of the collection for education and outreach activities), and contribution to undergraduate and graduate teaching.

Located on the MSU-Starkville Campus, the Department of Biological Sciences is housed in recently-renovated Harned Hall, which provides modern facilities for cutting-edge research. The department offers degrees at the B.S. (Biological Sciences, Medical Technology, and Microbiology), M.S. (Biological Sciences thesis and non-thesis) and Ph.D. (Biological Sciences) levels. For more information please visit: http://www.biology.msstate.edu.

The Mississippi State University Herbarium (MISSA in Index Herbariorum) was founded in 1885 with approximately 6,000 specimens. The herbarium houses many noteworthy collections from southeastern botanists of the 19^th & 20^th centuries, including S. M. Tracy, R. B. Channell, James D. Ray, Jr., and Sydney McDaniel. Today, MISSA houses more than 30,000 vascular plant specimens, with a strong focus on the southeastern United States, especially the state of Mississippi. The collection is currently undergoing digitization through the NSF-funded Magnolia grandiFLORA project, and data from this effort are being made available through a separate NSF-funded collaboration with the South East Regional Network of Expertise and Collections.

Mississippi State University is a comprehensive land-grant university that serves over 22,000 students. Faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences have diverse research interests in bioinformatics, cell biology, developmental biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, microbiology, and systematics, and are funded by the NIH, NSF and DOJ, as well as numerous private foundations. Campus research infrastructure includes supercomputing resources, and proteomics and genomics instrumentation at the Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing & Biotechnology, computing resources and statistical expertise at the Center for Computational Sciences, microscopy and imaging through the Institute for Imaging and Analytical Technologies and geospatial technology through the Geosystems Research Institute. Faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences have active collaborations with MSU faculty in the Departments of Anthropology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Geosciences, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Plant Pathology & Entomology, Biological Engineering, and the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Learn more and apply here!

Job Posting: Yale University - Cultural Heritage, Developer & Tech Lead

Yale University houses preeminent cultural and natural heritage collections (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University Library and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History) in pursuit of its mission to improve the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale’s collecting organizations complement physical collections with born-digital materials and through transformative digital systems to improve and expand access, streamline academic work, incorporate resources worldwide from other institutions, and provide a platform for developing new ways to conduct research, teach, learn and publish.

Information Technology Services (ITS) seeks a Senior Software Engineer to be a hands-on developer who will provide technical leadership to other software engineers in developing innovative web applications that support shared practices across Yale’s collecting organizations as well as the global cultural and natural heritage community. This person keeps current with existing and emerging cultural and natural heritage technologies, standards, and best practices; and, participates in higher-education cultural and natural heritage conferences, projects, and standards groups to stay apprised of industry direction and opportunities for collaboration.

Through close collaboration with the library, galleries and museums, this person provides vision, planning, guidance, consultation, mentoring and coordination of cultural and natural heritage multi-departmental software development projects. This person ensures that applications are designed and deployed to provide ample performance to process large volumes of information in a variety of formats including but not limited to text, images, audio, video, metadata, structured data, and unstructured data managed by Yale’s libraries, galleries, and museums.

The person will participate in the implementation of programming standards and methodologies to improve overall efficiency in developing, deploying and operating reliable software applications. Senior Software Engineer actively engages in all aspects of the software application lifecycle from user input through design, code development, quality assurance, operations, continuous improvement, and decommissioning.

Find out more about the position here: http://bit.ly/52447BR.

Call for Nominations: Biological Collections: Their Past, Present, and Future Contributions and Options for Sustaining Them

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Call for Nominations:

Biological Collections:

Their Past, Present, and Future Contributions and Options for Sustaining Them

Nominate an Expert

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Board on Life Sciences (BLS) is seeking nominations of experts to serve on a new study committee that will review the role of biological collections in research and education.

For this task, the expert committee will focus on living stocks (organisms) and preserved repositories of biodiversity specimens and materials that are financially supported in full or in part by the National Science Foundation. The committee will describe the major advances in the use of collections over the last decade; envision future innovative ways in which biological collections can be utilized; describe the greatest challenges to maintaining biological collections; and suggest a range of long-term strategies that could be used for their sustained support, individually or in groups, of research and education.

View the full statement of task (PDF).

BLS is seeking nominees for experts that reflect the diversity of life sciences research activities conducted using biological collections including, but not limited to:

Biodiversity
Marine Science
Ecology
Environmental Science
Evolutionary Biology

Ideal candidates also will have expertise in one or more of the following:

Collection curation and management
Data management and storage
Imaging technologies
Formal and informal education
Financial administration
Broad knowledge of biological collections and their use in research and education

Self-nominations are accepted. Nominations are requested no later than Friday, September 21, 2018.

For more information or to subscribe for updates about the study, click the button below.

Subscribe to Study Listserv

Tweet about it:
Call for Nominations! Nominate an expert for a new study from @theNASEM: "Biological Collections: Their Past, Present, and Future Contributions and Options for Sustaining Them." Entries due 9/21: https://bit.ly/2MShIXJ #BioCollections

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2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge Now Open

Are you an open data champion? The 2018 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge will award up to €34,000 in prizes to the most innovative entries that rely on open biodiversity data or open-source tools from the GBIF network to advance open science.

Between 9 May and 5 September, 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 incentive competition. Challenge entries may choose to develop new applications, visualizations, methods, workflows or analyses, or build on and extend existing tools and features like:

Entries should benefit multiple stakeholder groups, among them researchers, policymakers, educators, students and citizen scientists, and an expert panel of jury will judge entries on their openness and repeatability, relevance and novelty. Winners will be announced on 17 October 2018 at the 25th GBIF Governing Board meeting in Kilkenny, Ireland.

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.

Submission deadline

5 Sept 2018, 1600 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 under an external contract issued by 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 any repository or platform they’re comfortable with—GitHub, Dryad, FigShare, Open Science Framework, Jupyter Notebook, or use their own website.

By encouraging entrants to use tools that they are 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 2018 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.

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.

Special thanks

The 2018 Challenge is funded in part with the financial support of the Swedish Research Council.

https://www.gbif.org/news/1GQURfK5jS4Iq4O06Y0EK4/2018-gbif-ebbe-nielsen-...