I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt. I discovered SMTM through its fascinating discussions of scurvy and citrus-fruit taxonomy.

In a previous post, I described a coding challenge sent to me by my colleague.

A colleague sent me a coding challenge. This is a short post to describe how I tackled it. Edit: a follow-up post is here.

We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and even between the sides of individual vertebrae.

Somewhat stunned by the fact that my DNA barcode browser I described earlier was one of the (minor) prizewinners in this year's GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. For details on the winner and other place getters see ShinyBIOMOD wins 2020 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. Obviously I'm biased, but it's nice to see the challenge inspiring creativity in biodiversity informatics. Congratulations to everyone who took part.

Motivated by the 2020 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge I've put together an interactive DNA barcode browser. The app is live at https://dna-barcode-browser.herokuapp.com. A naturalist from the 19th century would find little in GBIF that they weren’t familiar with. We have species in a Linnean hierarchy, their distributions plotted on a map.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. You're feeling pretty good about your institution's collections data.

I've written up my entry for the 2018 GBIF Challenge ("Ozymandias") and posted a preprint on Biorxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/04/485854). The DOI is https://doi.org/10.1101/485854 which, last time I checked, still needs to be registered. The abstract appears below. I'll let the preprint sit there for a little while before I summon the enthusiasm to revisit it, tidy it up, and submit it for publication.

Quick note to express my delight and surprise that my entry for the 2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge come in joint first! My entry was Ozymandias - a biodiversity knowledge graph which built upon data from sources such as ALA, AFD, BioStor, CrossRef, ORCID), Wikispecies, and BLR.

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