Nico Franz and Beckett W. Sterner recently published a preprint entitled "To Increase Trust, Change the Social Design Behind Aggregated Biodiversity Data" on bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/157214 Below is the abstract: Below I respond to some specific points that annoyed me about this article, at the end I try and sketch out a more constructive response.

GBIF is running its Ebbe Nielsen Challenge for the third successive year. This year the title is Liberating species records from open data repositories for scientific discovery and reuse. To quote from the Challenge background on Devpost: In essence, the 2017 Challenge is to develop tools to discover these biodiversity-relevant datasets, and make them available to GBIF.

finch has just been released to CRAN (binaries should be up soon). finch is a package to parse Darwin Core files. Darwin Core (DwC) is: GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is the biggest holder of biodiversity data.

Following on from adding DNA barcodes to GBIF I've now uploaded a taxonomic classification of DNA barcode BINs (Barcode Index Numbers). Each BIN is a cluster of similar DNA barcodes that is essentially equivalent to a species.

I've uploaded all the COI barcodes in the iBOL public data dumps into GBIF. This is an update of an earlier project that uploaded a small subset. Now that dataset doi:10.15468/inygc6 has been expanded to include some 2.7 million barcodes.

The GBIF 2016 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has received 15 submissions. You can view them here: Unlike last year where the topic was completely open, for the second challenge we've narrowed the focus to "Analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data". As with last year, judging is limited to the jury (of which I'm a member), however anyone interested in biodiversity informatics can browse the submissions.

In a classic paper Boggs (1949) appealed for an “atlas of ignorance”, an honest assessment of what we know we don’t know: This is the theme of this year's GBIF Challenge: Analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data. "Gaps" can be gaps in geographic coverage, taxa group, or types of data. GBIF is looking for ways to access the nature of the gaps in the data it is aggregating from its network of contributors.

One of my frustrations with the GBIF portal is that it is hard to drill down and search in a specific area. You have to zoom in and then click for a list of occurrences in the current bounding box of the map. You can't, for example, draw a polygon such as the boundary of a protected area and search within that area.

One of GBIF's goals is to provide up to date, comprehensive data on the distribution of species. Although GBIF's taxonomy and geographic scope is global, not all species are equal, in the sense that the need for information on some species is potentially much more pressing. An example are mosquitoes of the genus Aedes , such as the species A. aegypti and A. albopictus that spread the Zika virus.

TL;DR; The Plant List is now in GBIF http://doi.org/10.15468/btkum2. Readers of this blog may recall that I've had a somewhat jaundiced view of The Plant List.