Biosymposium

Biodiversity technologies: held on the 27th and 28th of September, 2012

The Biodiversity Institute’s research theme on Biodiversity Technologies aims to engage in agenda-setting research from which it develops web-based toolsthat enable an easy identification of species and the assessment of important regions for biodiversity conservation. This year’s Biodiversity Institute Symposium highlighted the use of emerging technologies in biodiversity science and conservation. The symposium brought together over 36 speakers and 21 posters – presenting the latest research and developments in biodiversity technologies that are used in wide variety of settings and applications, including: bioacoustics, citizen science, field data collection, mapping and genetic technologies.

Video

Programme

Download full symposium programme. Individual presentations can be accessed by clicking on the titles below. If you have any questions and further information about the symposium, please contact us.

Novel technologies for collecting field data

Daniel Kissling (Aarhus University, Denmark) – Challenges and prospects in the telemetry of insects
Stephen Ellwood (WildCRU, University of Oxford) – The Wildsensing Project: discovering badger social networks
Tim Coulson (Imperial College London) – Wireless mice: tracking small rodents in real time in the field
Michelle Taylor (Dept. of Zoology, University of Oxford) – Mapping the Deep: ecosystems of Southwest Indian Ocean seamounts
Tim Guilford (Dept. of Zoology, University of Oxford) – Tracking the behaviour of the oceans’ wanderers

Genomic Observatories: Biodiversity genomic observing systems

Neil Davies (UC Berkeley) & Dawn Field (NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) –The Genomic Observatories Network: from Moorea Biocode to Ocean Sampling Day
David Schindel (Smithsonian Institute, USA) – The Consortium for the Barcode of Life
Guy Cochrane (European Bioinformatics Institute) – Merging sequence (genomic) and biodiversity data in the INSDC
Éamonn Ó Tuama (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) - Accommodating genomic biodiversity data in the GBIF network

Virtual information technologies for research and conservation

Stephen Harris (Dept. of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford) – The challenge of more and better botanical data from the field and herbaria
Hannes Gaisberger (Bioveristy, Rome) – Conservation priorities for Prunus africana defined with the aid of spatial analysis of genetic data and climatic variables
Ben Clark (Dept. of Zoology, University of Oxford) – EMonocot: a global online resource for monocot plants
Vincent Smith & Dave Roberts (Natural History Museum London) – Scratchpad virtual research environments: sharing, linking and publishing biodiversity data the ViBRANT way
Iead Rezek (Machine Learning Research Group, University of Oxford) – Inferring social network structure in ecological systems from spatio-temporal data streams

Citizen science: Recording and monitoring the natural environment

Jon Parsons (Global Canopy Programme, UK) – Technology to enable non-technical people to record the natural environment
Alistair Yeomans (Sylva Foundation, UK) – “myForest” – a working woodlands network
Jonathan Silvertown (The Open University) – iSpot:- the challenge of making a British success global
Tom Hart (Dept. of Zoology, University of Oxford) – Creating a monitoring network for Antarctica
Chris Sandbrook (University of Cambridge) – Can digital games and virtual worlds help us save nature?

Tools as change agents: Technology-inspired future visions

Muki Haklay (University College London) – The role of technology in extending Citizen Science to new groups and places
Johannes Vogel (Museum für Naturkunde, BERLIN) – NHM 3.0: Nature-Humans-Machines
Lian Pin Koh (ETH, Zurich) – Conservation drones : real-time remote sensing
Andy Clements –(British Trust for Ornothology, UK) Big data, big volunteering, smart technology – BTO biodiversity monitoring 2025
Paul Jepson (SoGE, University of Oxford) – Opti-hunting: a technology inspired vision for resolving migratory bird hunting

Genetic technologies to unravel species diversity

Marta Riutort (Universitat de Barcelona) – How can a “morphology-less” organism benefit from new high-throughput molecular methodologies: the case of planarians diversity
Ludovic Orlando (Natural History Museum of Denmark) – From the wild to domestication: comparative genomics of ancient and modern horses reveals specific demographic, admixture and selective signatures
Bastien Boussau (University of Berkeley, USA) – Phylogenetic inference from genomic data sets
Yuri Roskov (University of Reading) – Catalogue of Life: data assembly and public services

Bioacoustic technologies

David Chesmore (University of York) – Automated Identification of Species: current techniques and future directions
Karl-Heinz Frommolt (Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin) – Bioacoustic monitoring of nocturnal wetland bird
Gianni Pavan (University of Pavia, Italy) – Soundscape libraries as a tool for conservation and education
Alex Rogers (University of Southampton) – Smartphone-based Biodiversity Monitoring: Mobilising the crowd in the hunt for the New Forest Cicada

Moving forward: Realising the potential of biodiversity technology tools

Atte Moilanen (University of Helsinki) – Zonation (Biodiversity Conservation Informatics)
Mark Mulligan (Kings College London) - Web-tools for mapping ecosystem services and our impacts upon them
Neil Boucher (SoundID, Australia) – A high precision sound recognition system suitable for complex studies, including the dawn chorus and mixed species surveys, with demonstrated 95%+ accuracy
Kathy Willis & Peter Long (Director, Biodiversity Institute, University of Oxford) – Remote assessment of ecologically sensitive landscapes anywhere in the world: development of a Local Ecological Footprint Tool (LEFT)