Jens-Christian Svenning uses GBIF-enabled data to study how biodiversity responds to climate change.

A Danish scientist whose work may help to predict the response of biodiversity to future climate change has been presented with a major award at a ceremony in Argentina.

Jens-Christian Svenning, professor of ecoinformatics and biodiversity at Aarhus University, was selected as the the 2011 winner of the Ebbe Nielsen Prize, awarded annually by GBIF to recognize novel use of biosystematics and biodiversity informatics.

The ceremony was among the events associated with the annual GBIF Governing Board meeting, taking place in Buenos Aires, where Svenning is also presenting his work at the 2011 GBIF Science Symposium.

The prize was awarded in recognition of Svenning’s work in the field of macroecology, which deals with the relationship between organisms and their environment at a large scale, to describe patterns of abundance, distribution and diversity.

Speaking shortly before receiving the award, Svenning said, “It is very inspiring to get this appreciation from GBIF, and I think that as a researcher inspiration is what you need to go forward.”

Svenning intends to use the prize to fund studies on integrating biodiversity informatics, ecology, climate modelling and phylogenetics (the study of evolutionary relatedness among species) to gain a better understanding of what determines species diversity.

“Some of the issues I have addressed in my work have to do with how climate impacts biodiversity. It is very important to understand this to predict how biotic communities and ecosystems will respond to future climate change, something we still don’t understand very well,” said Svenning.

“I have a lot of interest in looking into how past climate change has impacted biodiversity patterns and still impact them. This is one way to understand what is coming.

“We have to realize that many of our estimates about climate change impacts on biodiversity are probably very conservative. I tend to think that those impacts are going to be more dramatic than most models predict.”

Svenning said of his use of data accessed through GBIF: “We cannot study the impacts of climate change on biodiversity without access to large amounts of spatial data on occurrence of species.

“The data can come from various sources, but GBIF offers a portal where a large amount of such data can be accessed. GBIF offers access to raw data such as observations of species, which is useful to work with.”

Presenting the prize to Jens-Christian Svenning, the chair of the GBIF Science Committee, Leonard Krishtalka, said,”In making this award, GBIF recognizes Dr Svenning’s groundbreaking research and international leadership in macroecology. Dr Svenning uses biodiversity and ecological informatics to merge and model the complex spatial, temporal, phylogenetic and climatic dynamics of species of plants and animals and, ultimately, of communities.

“His research on predictive modeling of environmental phenomena encompasses plants and animals from the Pleistocene and its glacial ages to the present and into the future.”

The Ebbe Nielsen Prize is an annual award of €30,000 which recognizes an early-career researcher whose work combines biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in a novel way. It was established in honour of the late Ebbe Nielsen, a Danish entomologist who was among the inspiring founders of GBIF but tragically died just before it came to fruition in 2001.

For more information, contact:
Dr. Jens-Christian Svenning
Professor, Aarhus University
svenning@biology.au.dk

Tim Hirsch
GBIF Secretariat
thirsch@gbif.org
www.gbif.org