Wednesday, October 21, 2020

GBIF Challenge success

Somewhat stunned by the fact that my DNA barcode browser I described earlier was one of the (minor) prizewinners in this year's GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. For details on the winner and other place getters see ShinyBIOMOD wins 2020 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. Obviously I'm biased, but it's nice to see the challenge inspiring creativity in biodiversity informatics. Congratulations to everyone who took part.

My entry is live at https://dna-barcode-browser.herokuapp.com. I had a difficult time keeping it online over the summer due to meow attacks, but managed to sort that out. Turns out the cloud provider I used to host Elasticsearch switched from securing the server by default to making it completely open to anyone, and I'd missed that change.

Given that the project was a success, I'm tempted to revisit it and explore further ways to combine phylogenetic trees in a biodiversity browser.