Advancing Biodiversity e-science innovation through Global Cooperation. INCT & EUBrazilOpenBio Workshop, 19-20 Sept 2012, Recife

With 70% of the world’s catalogued animal and plant species found in Brazil, the countries botanists and biodiversity researchers can benefit massively from specialised large data e-Infrastructures which can speed up and facilitate scientific research. However, research is becoming increasingly data-driven and complex mathematical models are needed to analyse increasingly abundant data sets.

This workshop is the perfect platform for the biodiversity researchers to learn about how the tools and services of the EUBrazilOpenBio infrastructure can facilitate and accelerate their work with more accurate results.  With special focus on the Brazilian Virtual Herbarium community, experts will present step-by-step guides to  EUBrazilOpenBio’s innovative niche modeling tool and the comparative analysis of the Brazilian and the Global taxonomic plants catalogue.  

With keynotes presentations from Brazilian Ministry of Science and the European Commission, the workshop will also examine the social impact potential of e-infrastructures that leverage cloud and grid technologies. This impact will also come from building stronger ties between Europe and Brazil to address global biodiversity challenges.

The Virtual Herbarium of Plants and Fungi of Brazil (INCT)
The mission of the INCT Virtual Herbarium of Plants and Fungi is to provide a high quality, open botanical collections data infrastructure accessible to the public.  This will integrate the data held in Brazil’s herbaria and will repatriate data held in foreign herbaria. The principal activities of the Institute focus on two basic lines of research: (1) Biological diversity and taxonomy of plants and fungi, and (2) Use of data on species distributions for the formulation of public policy on plant and fungal diversity.

EUBrazilOpenBio project: Open Data and Cloud Computing e-Infrastructure for Biodiversity across Europe and Brazil
EUBrazilOpenBio  is a collaborative research project co-funded by the European Commission and the Brazilian Minister of Science Technology and Innovation (MCTI - CNPq). Its objective is to deploy an e-Infrastructure of Open Access resources serving the needs of the biodiversity scientific community. This will be done by integrating and interoperating EU and Brazilian data, cloud, and grid infrastructures and resources across biodiversity & taxonomy, fostering cooperation between the two ICT and biodiversity scientific communities.

For more information about the event visit: www.eubrazilopenbio.org