Both the 2025 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge and the 2025 Graduate Researcher’s Awards have opened for nominations.
Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
The Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has opened its 2025 call for innovative tools, both new and existing, that leverage biodiversity data from the GBIF network to advance open science in support of research and policy. An expert jury will judge entries on their relevance, novelty and quality to select a pool of winners to share a prize pool of up to €20,000.
Between now and the deadline – 7 September 2025 – individuals and teams can submit entries to this open-ended incentive competition, detailing the unique tools and inventive techniques they’ve developed or improved to increase the accessibility, quality and usefulness of open biodiversity data.
Challenge entries may detail newly developed functional prototypes, tools and techniques or existing ones whose capabilities and features have been improved or extended. Entrants can explore last year’s entries along with dozens of previous Challenge winners for inspiration on ideas, topics and approaches worth pursuing.
Entries should benefit multiple GBIF constituencies, including data users, data holders and data managers.
Winners will be announced following the 32nd GBIF Governing Board meeting at Living Data 2025, a joint conference of GBIF, TDWG, OBIS and GEO BON held in Bogotá, Colombia, between 21 and 24 October 2025.
Graduate Researcher’s Award
On behalf of its network of national Voting and Associate Participants, the GBIF Secretariat is pleased to invite nominations for the 2025 Graduate Researcher’s Award. This annual programme aims to highlight innovative research and discovery in biodiversity informatics by graduate students whose master’s and doctoral studies rely on GBIF-mediated data.
The 2025 programme will provide two €5,000 prizes recognising the work of two early-career researchers. Candidates receive formal nominations from the node managers and heads of delegation from GBIF Participant countries, who generally select one master’s and one PhD candidate whose nominations are then forwarded to the GBIF Secretariat.
An expert jury coordinated through GBIF Science Committee will then select two award recipients from the pool of nominees whose names are received by the GBIF Secretariat by Friday, 27 June 2025. The GBIF Secretariat will announce winners prior to the 32nd meeting of the GBIF Governing Board, on 18-20 October 2025 in Bogotá, Colombia, and present their work at that meeting.
While the deadline for receipt of nominations at the GBIF Secretariat is 27 June 2025, local deadlines for nominations will apply. Please see the GBIF website for more information, the submission process and latest dates.