Speaker: Dr. Erick Mata

Title: Biodiversity Informatics: Using Information Technology to face the challenges of Biodiversity Conservation

Abstract:
Biodiversity conservation involves a deep scientific understanding of biodiversity at the genetic, species, and ecosystem level. However there are huge information gaps for scientists and decision makers to do their work. In many cases, enough high quality up to date information has not been generated, in others, relevant information is scattered, locked away or stored in non-standard formats. As scientists started putting together this puzzle at each of the three levels of biodiversity and establishing connections across levels, it has become evident that information technologies play a critical role.

Biodiversity conservation poses challenges not just at the scientific knowledge generation and management level. It is also challenging in terms of helping find sustainable uses and support concrete biodiversity conservation actions in the field.

How ITs support these biodiversity conservation challenges is the focus of this introductory talk about Biodiversity Informatics. In addition to presenting the current state of the art, we will discuss some of the topics presented in the recently issued GBIO (Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook) document, which ”proposes a framework that will help harness the immense power of information technology and an open data culture, to gather unprecedented evidence about biodiversity and to inform better decisions.”

Bio:
Dr. Erick Mata is an associate professor of Computer Science and the director of graduate studies at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology. His research interests include biodiversity informatics, scientific visualization, algorithmic graph theory, and multimedia systems.

Dr. Mata obtained his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Oregon in 1990. He was the Director of Biodiversity Informatics at INBio, the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica, for 15 years from 1995 to 2010. From 2011 through 2013 he was the Executive Director of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), a global initiative lead by the Smithsonian Institution that has generated more than 800,000 species pages and integrates information from more than 280 partners worldwide, including more than 2.3 million images and 40 million pages of scientific publications.

Dr. Mata served as chair of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Outreach and Capacity Building Subcommittee (2001-2005) and as chair of the GBIF Science Committee (2007-2009). He was the Coordinator of the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) Species and Specimen Thematic Network from 2006 to 2010.