The Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is an international science competition conducted annually from 2015 onwards by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), with a set of cash prizes that recognize researcher(s)' submissions in creating software or approaches that successfully address a GBIF-issued challenge in the field of biodiversity informatics.
The name of the challenge honours the memory of prominent entomologist and biodiversity informatics proponent Ebbe Nielsen, who died of a heart attack in the U.S.A. en route to the 2001 GBIF Governing Board meeting.
From 2015 onwards, GBIF re-launched the award process as a competition between global individuals or teams of researchers to create new software or approaches to using biodiversity data according to a theme announced annually for each round of the competition, and also to split the prize money among multiple groups instead of a single winner as in the initial era of the Prize.
[14] Challenge: "The 2017 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge seeks submissions that repurpose these datasets [in public open-access repositories] and adapting them into the Darwin Core Archive format (DwC-A), the interoperable and reusable standard that powers the publication of almost 800 million species occurrence records from the nearly 1,000 worldwide institutions now active in the GBIF network.
Challenge submissions may be new applications, visualization methods, workflows or analyses, or they build on and extend existing tools and features.