GBIF 2012 Ebbe Nielsen Prize Winner

This year’s €30,000 Ebbe Nielsen Prize should contribute to better understanding of how plants respond to climate change, following the selection of Nathan Swenson from the United States to receive the prestigious annual award funded by GBIF.

Swenson is associate professor at the Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University. His work demonstrates how occurrence data such as those available through GBIF can help understand the impact of climate on species distributions. He proposes to use the award towards a project that uses data published through GBIF, and data from the iPlant Tree of Life programme, for a large-scale analysis to study the evolution of climatic niches in plants. The analysis will be carried out jointly with the Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity Group at the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Denmark.