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  • Field Museum and iNaturalist Adopt Darwin Core Resource Relationship Standard to Share Species Interaction Records
    The Field Museum and iNaturalist capture detailed records on how species interact. They both showed their capacity to innovate by using the recently improved Darwin Core Resource Relationship extensions to publish their interaction records. By using this standards based approach, they facilitate access to the valueable biodiversity knowledge they keep, and provide examples for others to follow. More ...
  • The (un)-hidden iguana puzzle
    Green iguanas have a ferocious appearance but are largely vegetarians. They hatch from an egg as a tiny lizard, but can live for 20 years and grow to 1.5 meters and 9kg. In many places have escape or been release from captivity and have become established and invasive. We sought to understand what impact they might have in natural ecosystems by adding to and using the biotic interactions in GloBI. More ...
  • GloBI and BDMY partnership - a symbiotic history
    There is a consensus on the fundamental role that biotic interactions have on ecological processes. However, when evaluating the relative importance of each type of interaction, the competition or predator/prey interaction takes all the credit, while symbiotic relationships pass for mere ecological curiosities. However, symbiosis is a frequent phenomenon in the marine environment mainly responsible for its actual structure. For this reason, it is necessary to develop comprehensive analytic methods, such as those set in the BDMY Marine Species Interactions project, and working together with the GloBI initiative. For more details go to this note. More ...
  • Extracting Parasite Interaction Data from a Scientific Paper using Google Sheets
    During my senior year at Texas A&M University, I had the privilege of participating in a data transcription project. The goal of the project was to make parasite data generally more accessible to everyone. My task was to gather data from a host-parasite list from a scientific paper (Light et al. 2019) and prepare it for upload into GloBI by entering information into specific fields on a Google Sheet. More ...
  • Releasing Biological Data from COVID-19 Lockdown
    During the current lockdown, the museum collection community established an international COVID-19 Task Force. COVID-19 research touches upon many aspects of science and data management. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is likely to have originated from bats, and knowledge about bat ecology and interactions could be critical to avoiding crises like this in the future (Andersen et al., 2020). More ...
  • Tracking Parasites
    The Terrestrial Parasite Tracker project uses GloBI to find, index and review parasite-host associations captured in openly accessible digital collections shared by participating institutions. More ...
  • Associating with Natural History Collections
    Natural history collections contain essential building blocks for our scholarly record — physical evidence. Through persistent, often slightly obsessive, work by generations of curators and collection managers, millions of physical specimens have withstood the tooth of time. More ...
  • Models in Fashion
    GloBI adapts to whatever contributors decided to express their digital data in and currently supports over 40+ flavors of species interaction data formats. This makes GloBI both fashionable and unfashionable – newer, hipper formats/models are supported as well as those that have been around for a while. Being fashionable has the advantage of appealing to the new hip kids in town. Supporting the older formats, however, might actually be crucial to preserve valuable datasets from previous generations. More ...
  • Desert Island
    What happens if GloBI is no longer maintained? More ...
  • Catalyzing Data Exchange
    An increased collaboration between individuals, projects and institutions, catalyzes the preservation and proliferation of valuable datasets that describe how organisms interact. More ...
  • Missed Connections
    An ambitious team of students of the 2017 edition of Katy Börner's information visualization course (IVMOOC) took on the task to find missing interactions in Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI). Now, you might wonder, how do you find something that is missing? More ...
  • Lifestages of Species Interaction Datasets
    Just like organisms, datasets get born, grow up, reproduce, and die. GloBI's mission is to help increase the productivity (or reuse), and increase the lifespan of, datasets before they meet their maker. More ...
  • Lunch in Costa Rica
    The increased availability of digital records on where organisms hangout (or occur) has been facilitated by Darwin Core, a community standard for exchanging biodiversity information. TDWG (pronounced tahd-wick), the association that helped nurture this standards into maturity, held this year's annual meeting in Costa Rica. While the primary focus of Darwin Core is on species occurrence, an extension mechanism is provided to help capture other kinds of aspects of biodiversity data. More ...
  • Ecology of Data
    In his landmark publication “Animal Ecology,” Charles Elton points out that only after we organize knowledge across a “colossal store of facts” published in books and journals can we understand ecology beyond “clearcut niches which happened to have been worked out.” More ...
  • Pollinating Nerds
    A herd of nature nerds gathered for the Nerds for Nature Summit 2015 at Manylabs in San Francisco, California. Nerds for Nature and Manylabs facilitate invaluable interactions between folks from various disciplines (e.g. software, hardware, education, design) to develop and mature projects centered around open data, and open (citizen) science. More ...
  • Massive Open Online Data
    The challenge was to create an engaging experience for high school students to explore food webs in and outside of the classroom. More ...
  • Tea at Berkeley Institute for Data Science
    Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI) was topic of an afternoon Tea talk at Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). Located in the historic Doe Memorial Library, BIDS helps to advance data-intensive science across the UC Berkeley campus. More ...
  • Eating Pudding
    “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” is a phrase that stuck out in comments on our recent paper in Ecological Informatics. Building GloBI is one thing, but getting the species interaction data into the hands of researchers and educators is another. More ...
  • A Food-Web Map of the World
    A food-web map of the world was created by combining species interaction data with terrestrial and marine ecoregions of the world and various openly available taxonomies like ITIS, NCBI and WoRMS. More ...
  • Exploring Antarctic Interactions Using GloBI's Interaction Browser
    Collecting and aggregating data is not enough. Only after locating and illuminating data with search and visualization tools, you can analyze and perhaps understand the biological mechanisms behind the data hidden inside species interaction datasets. More ...
  • What Parasites Does the Atlantic Croaker Host? Find Out on the Encyclopedia of Life
    Now that the Encyclopedia of Life has integrated GloBI data into its species pages, users of the Encyclopedia of Life gain access to all sorts of structured species-interaction data, and the hardworking scientists who collected the data are attributed for their research. More ...
  • The Anatomy of GloBI
    How does GloBI integrate and link existing species interaction datasets? More ...
  • Want to Explore Marine Food Webs in the Gulf of Mexico? Visit GoMexSI
    Gulf of Mexico Species Interactions, or GoMexSI, uses GloBI web services to provide the ability to explore marine predator-prey relationships in the Gulf of Mexico. More ...
  • Ever Been Eaten by Flies in Puerto Rico? You're Not Alone . . .
    Answer a question you might ask when you visit Puerto Rico. More ...
  • GloBI Presented at Marine Biology Meeting in Mexico City on May 23, 2013
    An interdisciplinary meeting at UAM-Iztapalapa in Mexico City helped stimulate research collaborations by providing access to a vast library of existing species-interaction datasets. More ...
  • GloBI at 15th Genomic Standards Consortium Meeting
    Thanks to our species-interaction data contributors and a compelling Gulf of Mexico food-web visualization, Cyndy Parr had a great story to tell about species-interaction data as part of her presentation “Encyclopedia of Life—Applying Concepts from Amazon.com and Lego to Biodiversity Informatics.” More ...
  • Students Use GloBI Data to Visualize Spatial Food Webs in Gulf of Mexico
    An insightful visualization of spatial marine food webs in the Gulf of Mexico. More ...
  • Sharing Ideas on GloBI Software and Data Models in Dolores Park, San Francisco
    Do good ideas start with a bunch of drawings on the back of a napkin? More ...
  • 2013 EOL Rubenstein Fellow
    “Unleashing EOL's Species Interaction Datasets—Integration, Visualization, and Analysis” was selected for the Rubenstein Fellows Program 2013. More ...

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