image Nelson Rios presents at the BITW I

Nelson Rios presents at the BITW I, Boulder, Colo. V. Barve. 2012

Biodiversity Informatics Training

Acceptance to the BITW is a competitive process and the workshop is limited to 25 participants. Planning for the next workshop is underway. Announcements regarding dates and deadlines for the 2013 Biodiversity Informatics Training workshop will be announced in the near future.

1 Description 2 Application 3 Schedule 4 More

Workshop submission/support

Submit application online or mail completed paper application to dbloom@vertnet.org (as scanned PDF) or via USPS or other service to:

David Bloom
VertNet Coordinator
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UCB
3101 Valley Life Sciences Building
Berkeley, CA 94720

All letters of recommendation must be mailed (via USPS or other service) to David Bloom at the address listed above.


Individuals selected for participation will receive support to cover reasonable costs for transportation, accommodations, and per diem. Accommodations will be provided on the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) campus.

Workshop structure

The course will run daily from 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday, with a one hour break for lunch (participants will arrive on Sunday and depart the following Saturday).

The goal of the workshop is to provide conceptual frameworks and hands-on experience on a suite of data sources such as VertNet (including MaNIS, FishNet, HerpNET, and ORNIS), EOL and Map of Life, and new and developing software tools such as BioGeomancer, GEOLocate, DivaGIS, Quantum GIS, R Statistics, ArcGIS, ModEco, Maxent, OpenModeller, etc.

At the end of each day, we will have an evening virtual colloquium. During the colloquium, a scientist will be invited to make a brief presentation about some of their current work and to talk about the resources, tools, and work flows they use to complete their research. This time will also allow participants the opportunity to discuss the day’s experiences and decompress (perhaps over an unofficial beer or other frosty beverage). The intent is to broaden the scope of the workshop and to involve participants in an informal discussion through which they may discover new and different ways to explore research work flows and informatics tools.

The afternoon of the last day of the course will be set aside to allow each team to present their research results to the larger group and to discuss their results and decision making processes, including the tools and work flows they used. Teams will provide a short written description of their findings/experience to be made available via multiple dissemination routes (e.g., the VertNet Blog) and the hope is that projects might lead to formal publications.