Press Releases:

Lead ORNIS programmer John Wieczorek has received the 2006 Ebbe Nielsen Prize, presented by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This prestigious award recognizes John's leadership and seminal contributions in the field of biodiversity informatics, including his role in development of DiGIR and distributed data networks (e.g., MaNIS, HerpNET, and ORNIS). John will use his prize to expand these projects to Brazil, Argentina, Madagascar and Russia. The Prize was awarded on 5 April 2006 in Cape Town, South Africa.

ORNIS received press in the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature. Read the article here.

Workshops and Symposia:

A symposium entitled New Answers from Old Specimens is planned for the 2008 AOU meeting in Portland (co-organized by Marina Anciães, Carla Cicero, and A. Townsend Peterson). This symposium is intended to explore ORNIS and other large-scale projects aimed at integrating and enriching data associated with natural history museum specimens, and the implications that its exploration and analysis have for understanding various aspects of bird biology and conservation. Tentative titles of talks are:

• Accumulation of Knowledge of Birds in North American Biocollections Institutions
  
• Tracking and Forecasting the Spread of Avian Zoonoses (Influenza and West Nile Virus)
  
• Linking Phylogeography and Distributional Ecology
  
• Forecasting Avifaunal Consequences of Global Climate Change
  
• TBA
  
• The ORNIS Network: State of the Network and Where it is Going

A georeferencing workshop for ORNIS participants was held at the University of California, Berkeley, from 27-31 August 2007. The workshop was led by ORNIS and HerpNET and attended by 18 participants from 15 institutions in Canada, United States, and Mexico, including representatives from ORNIS georeferencing work centers. Participants learned georeferencing and GIS methods using a variety of tools, in preparation for georeferencing of ORNIS locality data which is scheduled to begin on 1 September 2007 (Year 4 of the project).

A pre-meeting workshop was held on Tuesday, 23 August 2005 at the American Ornithologists' Union meeting in Santa Barbara, California. The workshop, entitled "Increasing Access to Avian Biodiversity Data," focused on developments regarding distributed databases of avian collections data (ORNIS) and bird monitoring data (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). We received excellent feedback from workshop attendees. ORNIS presentations can be found on the Documents page of the ORNIS website.