Deadline:
June 26, 2026
Location(s)
Norway Online
Winners will be announced following the 33rd GBIF Governing Board meeting in September in Oslo, Norway.
Overview
The 2026 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is seeking submissions of 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 €20,000.
Details
Challenge entries may detail recently developed functional prototypes, tools and techniques or existing ones whose capabilities and features have been improved or extended. Challenge submissions may be new applications, visualization methods, workflows or analyses, or building on and extending existing tools and features. Entrants can explore dozens of previous Challenge winners for inspiration on ideas, topics and approaches. Entries should be able to illustrate benefit to multiple end-users including data users, data holders and data managers.
The Challenge honours the memory of Dr Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen, an inspirational leader in the fields of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics and a principal founder of GBIF, who died suddenly just before GBIF came into being.
Opportunity is About
Eligibility
Candidates should be from:
Description of Ideal Candidate
Eligibility
The Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, companies and their employees, and governmental agencies and their employees.
The Challenge is not open to:
- Current staff members at the GBIF Secretariat
- Individuals currently contracting directly with the GBIF Secretariat
- Members of the GBIF Science Committee
- Heads of Delegation to GBIF
Criteria
A panel of expert judges from relevant scientific, informatics and technology domains will evaluate submissions based on the following criteria:
- Applicability: Does the Submission have sufficient relevance and scope that the communities GBIF support can use or build it?
- Benefit for GBIF network: Is there an added value of the submission for GBIF and how important/what kind of added value is it (new data, new community, new tools, outreach, policy briefing, etc.)?
- Innovation/Novelty: How new/unique is the Submission's contribution? Are there similar developments on the market (may be less user friendly)? Has a significant portion of the Submission been developed specifically for the Challenge/is strongly related to the Challenge?
- Quality of implementation: Does the Submission work reliably? Is the technical implementation well done? Are the tools and services well described?
- Openness and repeatability: Are the constituent elements of the Submission, like code and content, freely available and transparent? Are they appropriately licensed?
Dates
Deadline: June 26, 2026
Cost/funding for participants
Un-save Opportunity
Internships, scholarships, student conferences and competitions.
