International prize for biodiversity research awarded to Aarhus University scientist
Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus University, has been awarded the Ebbe Nielsen Prize for his research into how biodiversity is affected by climate change. He received the prize at a ceremony in Argentina.
2011.10.07
Jens-Christian Svenning, Professor of Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity at Aarhus University, has been awarded the international Ebbe Nielsen Prize of EUR 30,000. The prize is awarded once a year by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and it goes to a researcher who has demonstrated new ways of using biosystematics and biodiversity informatics.
The prize was awarded at a ceremony in Buenos Aires, where Professor Svenning presented his research at the GBIF’s annual science symposium.
The prize was awarded in recognition of Professor Svenning’s work within macroecology, where he studies the relationship between organisms and their environment on a large scale and describes the patterns of frequency, distribution and diversity.
At a speech in connection with the presentation of the prize, Professor Svenning said: “It’s very inspiring to receive this recognition from the GBIF, and I think that inspiration is what a researcher needs to carry on.”
Professor Svenning will use the prize money to finance studies of how to integrate biodiversity informatics, ecology, climate modelling and phylogenetics (the study of the evolutionary relatedness among species) to achieve a better understanding of what determines the diversity of different species.
“Some of the topics I’ve studied involved climate impact on biodiversity. It’s very important to understand this to be able to predict how biological communities and ecosystems will react to future climate change – something we don’t yet understand very well,” said Professor Svenning.
“I’m very interested in studying how past changes in the climate impacted on biodiversity patterns and the extent to which they still play a role. It’ll help us understand what’s coming,” he added.
“We have to realise that many of our estimates of the impact of climate change on biodiversity are likely to be very conservative. I’m inclined to think that the impact will be much more dramatic than what the majority of current models predict,” he said.
About his use of data available through the GBIF, Professor Svenning said: “We can’t study the impact of climate change on biodiversity without having access to large amounts of data regarding the occurrence of different species. The information can come from different sources, but the GBIF makes large amounts of this type of data available via an Internet portal. The GBIF provides access to raw data such as observations of species, which is valuable for our work.”
When presenting Professor Svenning with the prize, Leonard Krishtalka – chair of the GBIF science committee – said: “With this prize, the GBIF recognises Professor Svenning’s ground-breaking research and his position as a leader in macroecology. Professor Svenning uses biodiversity and ecoinformatics to compare and model the impact of complex spatial, temporal, phylogenetic and climatic dynamics of fauna, flora and biological communities. His research into predictive modelling of environmental factors includes plants and animals from the Pleistocene period with its ice ages up to the present day and into the future.”
About the prize
The Ebbe Nielsen Prize is an annual award of EUR 30,000 that recognises a young researcher whose work combines biosystematics and biodiversity informatics in novel ways. The prize was created in honour of the Danish entomologist Ebbe Nielsen, who was one of the inspirational founders of the GBIF, but who tragically died shortly before the GBIF became a reality in 2001.
GBIF
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) endeavours to make the entire world’s information about biodiversity freely available for search and analysis via the Internet. This is achieved through collaboration between the many countries and organisations that are members of the GBIF. The GBIF’s secretariat is located at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. The GBIF began in 2001 and now makes more than 300 million data items available via its data portal (http://data.gbif.org).
Contact details
Jens-Christian Svenning
Department of Bioscience
Aarhus University
+45 2899 2304
svenning@biology.au.dk
Tim Hirsch
GBIF Secretariat
thirsch@gbif.org
www.gbif.org
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