The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is an annual incentive prize that seeks to inspire innovative applications of open-access biodiversity data by scientists, informaticians, data modelers, cartographers and other experts.
Like the Ebbe Nielsen Prize it replaced, the Challenge honours the memory of Dr Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, an inspirational leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics and one of the principal founders of GBIF, who tragically died just before it came into being.
While the focus of the competition has evolved from year to year, Challenge entries manifest a variety of forms and approaches—new analytical research, richer policy-relevant visualizations, web and mobile applications, or improvements to processes around data digitization, quality and access.
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.
Deadline: Sep. 7, 2025
The Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, companies and their employees, and governmental agencies and their employees.