Several members of the BGC Center joined the week-long GEO BON 2023 Global Conference: Monitoring Biodiversity for Action in Montreal, Canada, an event that was filled with talks, posters, and workshops about the latest developments and crucial questions for biodiversity data collection, analysis, and impact.
Five BGC Center members gave talks at the event:
- Tamara Rudic gave a talk titled “Map of Life species monitoring and planning interfaces for local to national scales” in the Mainstreaming Biodiversity Monitoring into Policy and Practice session where she presented on the Center’s ongoing efforts to develop efficient and accessible biodiversity monitoring interfaces with country partners.
- Walter Jetz gave a talk titled “The calculation and delivery of Essential Biodiversity Variables for Species Populations” in the From Biodiversity Data to Species Population EBVs, Indicators and Decision Support session, which he co-organized, where he discussed the importance of EBVs and recent developments in the EBV space for species populations.
- Kevin Winner gave a talk titled “Continental-scale multi-taxon distribution EBVs to support biodiversity assessment and monitoring” in the From Biodiversity Data to Species Population EBVs, Indicators and Decision Support session where he presented on his and the team’s efforts to model distributions of thousands of species across North America and Southeast Asia.
- Benjamin Kellenberger gave a talk titled “Deep Learning for Species Distribution Modelling” in the From Biodiversity Data to Species Population EBVs, Indicators and Decision Support session where he discussed the potential opportunities and obstacles for the future of deep learning in species distribution modeling.
- Jeremy Cohen gave a talk titled “Continental species distribution and biodiversity predictions depend on modeling grain” in the session Tools and Models for Biodiversity Monitoring where he discussed systematic biases in biodiversity predictions at coarse grains.
Two BGC Center presented posters:
- Richard Li presented a poster titled “Detection of taxonomic concept mismatches in biodiversity occurrence data can assist the identification of alien occurrences” during the Poster Session where he presented his work developing a workflow to identify taxonomic concept mismatches in biodiversity data sets.
- Shubhi Sharma presented a poster titled “Mapping more of biodiversity – Borrowing Information Across the Tree of Life” during the Poster Session where she presented her work using phylogenetic relationships to “borrow” information from data-rich species to inform better models for closely-related, data-poor species.
Additionally, several members of the Map of Life team held a workshop to present and demo various features of the Map of Life website, including the many spatial distribution data available on species pages, the ongoing effort to develop species distribution models worldwide, our three biodiversity indicators, and the newly-enhanced Regions tool, which generates data-backed lists of expected and recorded species for any area on Earth.
These tools were also in full display at our Map of Life booth throughout the event, where we invited conference attendees to explore the site on our interactive board.
