Penalties have been a reoccurring problem for Maryland during the Mike Locksley era, and though the Terrapins tamped them down last season, they are racking up quick again in 2024.

Maryland has been selected to finish in the middle of the new 18-team pack in this year's unofficial Big Ten men's basketball preseason poll.

With thinner margins in a strengthened and expanded conference along with Maryland's struggle to limit penalties, Friday night's home game with Northwestern is now a keystone to get to bowl eligibility.

There's no such thing as an off week during football season, even when there's not a game on the schedule. For Maryland players and coaches, the goal is to strike a balance between getting away from football and still being connected to football.

Another moribund post-bye week performance under Mike Locksley reared its ugly head for Maryland Friday night against Northwestern in an embarrassing 37-10 loss.

The Maryland Terrapins are used to hoeing a difficult road during the football season. In 2024, however, the difference is a team that has not only failed to reach rather mild expectations, but one that is severely underperforming.

Southern California and Maryland met Saturday for the first time in football and as Big Ten members, but if you didn't know any better, it was as if an old Pac-12 after dark game broke out. Maryland mounted a two touchdown comeback in the fourth quarter, capped by Billy Edwards Jr.'s 3-yard rushing score as the Terrapins beat the Trojans 29-28.

The Terrapins' struggles last season were rooted in the most basic of problems: They couldn't shoot, finishing 320th nationally in field goal percentage (41.3%) and 340th in 3-point percentage (28.9%).

Buoyed by a season-shifting comeback win over Southern California, Maryland now has a pep in its step as it hits the road again in the Big Ten this week.

Maryland is a 'developmental' program, as coach Mike Locksley likes to frequently remind, and it is in the midst of producing the next offensive player with star potential -- Octavian Smith Jr.

Year 1 for Kevin Willard was a supernova streaking through the sky, but year two brought high expectations that quickly crashed back to earth. For year three, the Maryland coach believes he has found the answer to the Terrapins offensive woes via both the transfer portal and one dynamic freshman: Derik Queen.

Last season marked the first time Maryland posted a .500 or better mark in the month of November under Mike Locksley. College football's final month has always been a gauntlet for Locksley's teams, a trend that continues Saturday at No. 1 Oregon.

The new Big Ten truly comes to full bore for Maryland this weekend with its first-ever West Coast conference trip to No. 1 Oregon, bringing with it a host of logistical tweaks and challenges.

Ryan Blaney had the checkered flag in sight and a spot in NASCAR's title-deciding race within his grasp last week on the last lap of a contentious battle.

Ryan Blaney celebrated his victory at Martinsville Speedway, a win that launched NASCAR's defending champion into the title-deciding season finale.

Utah athletic director Mark Harlan blasted the Big 12 officiating crew following BYU's 22-21 win over the Utes on Saturday night for controversial calls on the Cougars' winning drive.

Now back at home for the first time in nearly a month and with three games remaining, the chance for Maryland to salvage a disappointing season with a potential bowl appearance begins with Rutgers.

Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is a finalist for his first National League MVP award after winning the AL honor twice, joined among the top three in NL voting by New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor and Arizona second baseman Ketel Marte.

What Christians need to know about marriage. Learn how Christian marriage is very different, very special and very hard to break.

The Baltimore big man recorded a double-double -- in the first half alone -- en route to a stellar 22 point, 20 rebound debut as Maryland pulled away from Manhattan in the second half to win its season opener, 79-49

IOC presidential candidate Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. has urged European lawmakers to regard investing in sport as a public health policy in his first keynote speech of a six-month Olympic leadership campaign.

Paris's Notre Dame cathedral, whose historic bells were silenced following 2019's devastating fire, will soon echo again with fresh chimes.

Maya Lopez returns in a 5-episode limited event series

The post Now Streaming: Marvel’s Echo first appeared on SciFi Stream.

The EU BON project is pleased to announce the International Symposium "Nature and Governance – Biodiversity Data, Science, and the Policy Interface", which was held in Berlin from 11 to 12 February. The symposium aimed at clarifying and popularizing EU BON's objectives prior to the official EU BON Kick-off Meeting held from 13 to 15 February 2013.

The symposium was hosted by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and brought together high-ranking speakers and guests from across the world to talk and discuss the different aspects of the EU BON Project. Among the main issues covered was the future of biodiversity information, the challenges in front of new data policies, new approaches in collecting information, and ways to engage the public in biodiversity monitoring and assessments.

The EU BON project was started on 1 December, 2012, and will continue for 4.5 years. The aim of EU BON is to build a substantial part and contribute to the Group on Earth Observation's Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), through an innovative approach of integration of biodiversity information systems. The project, built as an answer to the need of a new integrated biodiversity data, will facilitate access to this knowledge and will effectively improve the work in the field of biodiversity observation in general.

###

For more information on the symposium and the events planned, please visit our programme page.

All interested parties are most welcome to attend the symposium or to follow it on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

Additional information

EU BON (2012) stands for "Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network" and is a European research project, financed by the 7th EU framework programme for research and development (FP7). EU BON seeks ways to better integrate biodiversity information and implement into policy and decision-making of biodiversity monitoring and management in the EU.

GEO BON stands for "Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network". It coordinates activities relating to the Societal Benefit Area (SBA) on Biodiversity of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Some 100 governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations are collaborating through GEO BON to organise and improve terrestrial, freshwater and marine biodiversity observations globally and make their biodiversity data, information and forecasts more readily accessible to policymakers, managers, experts and other users. Moreover, GEO BON has been recognized by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. More information at: http://www.earthobservations.org/geobon.shtml.

Monographs are fundamental for progress in systematic  botany. They are the vehicles for circumscribing and naming taxa, determining distributions and ecology,  assessing  relationships for formal classification, and interpreting long-term  and short-term  dimensions of the evolutionary process. Despite their importance, fewer monographs are now being prepared by the newer generation  of systematic  botanists, who are understandably involved principally with DNA data and analysis, especially for answering  phylogenetic, biogeographic, and population  genetic questions.  As monographs provide  hypotheses regarding species  boundaries and plant relationships, new insights  in many plant groups  are urgently  needed.  Increasing  pressures  on biodiversity, especially in tropical and developing regions of the world, emphasize this point. The results from a workshop (with 21 participants) reaffirm  the central role that monographs play in systematic  botany. But, rather than advocating abbreviated models  for monographic products,  we recommend a full presentation of relevant  information. Electronic  publication offers numerous  means of illustration of taxa, habitats, characters, and statistical and phylogenetic analyses, which previously  would have been prohibitively costly. Open Access and semantically enhanced  linked electronic  publications provide instant access to content from anywhere  in the world, and at the same time link this content to all underlying data and digital resources  used in the work.  Resources  in support  of monography, especially  databases  and widely  and easily  accessible  digital  literature and specimens, are now more powerful  than ever before, but interfacing and interoperability of databases  are much needed. Priorities  for new resources  to be developed  include an index of type collections and an online global chromosome database. Funding  for sabbaticals for monographers to work uninterrupted on major projects  is strongly  encouraged. We recommend that doctoral  students  be assigned  smaller  genera,  or natural  portions  of larger  ones (subgenera, sections,  etc.), to gain the necessary expertise for producing a monograph, including training in a broad array of data collection (e.g., morphology, anatomy, palynology, cytogenetics, DNA techniques, ecology, biogeography), data analysis (e.g., statistics,  phylogenetics, models), and nomenclature. Training programs, supported by institutes, associations, and agencies, provide means for passing on procedures and perspectives of challenging botanical  monography to the next generation  of young systematists.

In this guest post Martin Sharman opens up a rich area of debate by arguing that as a policy concept, ecosystem services puts human wants first and foremost and undermines moral-aesthetic value arguments for conservation that are widely held in society. Martin was the policy offer responsible for biodiversity and ecosystems in the European Commission’s DG Research & Innovation up until his retirement last November. During his career he made an enormous contribution to biodiversity research and policy, including the initiation of the BioFresh project. The opinions expressed in this post are, of course, his own and are not intended to represent a position of either the Commission or BioFresh.

A "resource" is something that is useful to someone. A "natural resource" is something in the natural environment that a human can use to satisfy want or increase wellbeing.

To adopt this vocabulary is to adopt a forthright utilitarian view of the natural environment, and implicitly to accept that human benefit is the only good. Not only is human benefit the only good, but it is quantifiable – for if not, then we can never agree on what constitutes a resource, or who has the greater right to it. Thus someone who speaks of natural resources accepts, again implicitly, that happiness and wellbeing can be quantified. The vocabulary also requires that this quantified human benefit remains, if not constant, then comparable over cultures and generations.

More than this: the wellbeing of the "resource" is insignificant. It is only by setting concern for the wellbeing of the resource to zero that one can regard it as merely something to satisfy human want. Human benefit is the only good. This is the First Commandment; in the limpid words of the King James version of the bible, thou shalt have no other gods before me.

In this observation lies much of the moral argument against the concept of ecosystem services: just as oranges are not the only fruit, so humans are not the only species.

The concept of ecosystem services is one thing; the premise of its proponents is another. It is, in short, that conservation based on intrinsic value of biodiversity has failed to stop the loss of species, ecosystems, and the complex web of interactions between them. Since an ethical argument has failed, then we should try self-interest. By demonstrating that human wellbeing is increased by the services rendered by ecosystems, we can motivate people to protect the source of the service – biodiversity.

We know that conservation is not working because we continue to lose biodiversity. Oh yeah? This is the equivalent of me deciding that my accelerator is not working because my car is losing speed. Why is such a daft non-sequitur accepted by otherwise intelligent people? You immediately thought of many reasons my car might be losing speed – I have the brakes on, I’m going up a hill, I’ve run out of fuel, I’ve run into sand, I’ve hit an oncoming truck. The obvious reason that we are losing biodiversity is the memento mori that stares at us from our looking glass – biodiversity loss is the inevitable result of our debt-based economic system and our swelling population’s unsustainable demands on nature. We all know that. Why do we mutely accept the dangerously diversionary nonsense that "biodiversity is being lost because conservation is not working"?

Ecosystem services takes the utilitarian logic of natural resources one important step further. A "service" by definition benefits humans. If we are to protect services only if they benefit humans, then what happens to the useless ecosystems? Are they simply to be cemented over?

I recently heard a discussion in which one person said "most people are useless", meaning that they are surplus to requirement. The outrage that this provoked was spearheaded by someone saying that you can never prove that anyone is useless, because you can never know enough about their contribution to their social fabric. So does this mean that you can never show that an ecosystem is useless? If so that leaves the ecosystem services argument saying that because some ecosystems benefit humans, we have to protect every ecosystem.

Which may be the right answer, but why reach it by such objectionable means?

For those of us with a reverence of nature, the ecosystem services rhetoric and mindset are abhorrent, being fundamentally immoral and unethical. They take the most ecologically damaging invasive species in the history of life, and place it above all other species on Earth. They cast all other – voiceless – species in the role of consumables. This mindset might have worked for Homo habilis. It will not work for Homo sapiens.

Martin Sharman  for the BioFresh Blog: http://biofreshblog.com/2013/07/03/perspective-martin-sharman-on-ethics-and-the-ecosystem-services-paradigm/

The Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg offers in cooperation with GEO BON and iDiv the position of Executive Director for the duration of 30 months (initially limited till September 30th, 2016 with possibility of extension). The Executive Director will work in close collaboration with the incoming Chair of the GEO BON Steering Committee, Prof. Henrique M. Pereira (iDiv) and the incoming vice-chair, Dr. Mike Gill (Environment Canada), thematic workgroup coordinators, regional BON coordinators, the GEO BON Steering Committee and the GEO secretariat.

Requirements:
• Ph.D. in ecology or related field
• excellent diploma or master degree in a relevant field
• demonstrable experience in project management with executive leadership in organizations a plus
• excellent communication skills, fluency in English, knowledge of other languages being a plus
• willingness to travel abroad frequently, outgoing and at ease in multicultural backgrounds

Topic/job description:
• Providing visible leadership for GEO BON and representing GEO BON at scientific and policy meetings
• Creating funding opportunities through engagement with potential donors
• Coordinating activities of GEO BON Working Groups and Regional Observation Networks
• Liaising with national and regional organizations involved in biodiversity monitoring and reporting
• Organize the Steering Committee, All-hands and other meetings of GEO BON and manage the communication activities of GEO BON, including a regular newsletter and a website
• Manage, as and when required, activities and inputs requested by the GEO secretariat

Applications should be directed to emily.keller@idiv.de and addressed to Henrique M. Pereira, Professor of Biodiversity Conservation, iDiv. Applications should be in a single PDF file with reference file number (D 189/2013). Applications are accepted until January 6th, 2014.

For more information see attached the full text of the job offer.

Ecosystem functioning, or the role which organisms play in an ecosystem, is becoming increasingly important in marine ecological and conservation. To facilitate such studies an international team of scientists lead by S. Faulwetter from the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HMRC) present the Polytraitsdatabase that aims to provide re-usable, and accessible data on marine bristle worms. The paper describing the new database was published in the innovative Biodiversity Data Journal, a pioneer in the publication of integrated biological data.

Benthic organisms participate in a number of biological processes in world water basins. Their functional diversity is an important community property demonstrating the role organisms have in the ecosystem and helping to understand how the community reacts to environmental changes. Polychaetes, or bristle worms, are marine worms famous for their peculiar shapes and often vivid coloration. More than 10,000 species are described in the class worldwide, most of which living in the shelf zone of the seas and oceans, burrowing in the sediment or swimming among the plankton.

At present, the Polytraits database contains almost 20,000 records on morphological, behavioural and reproductive characteristics of more than 1,000 species, all referenced by literature sources. All data on these engaging organisms can be freely accessed through the project website in different ways and formats, both human-readable and machine-readable. The new database presents a rich and easy to use collection, which cover morphological, reproductive and behavioural characteristics of polychaetes, as well as information on environmental preferences in an attempt to facilitate ecological research and conservation studies.

The researchers also provide a leading-edge approach to accessing, integrating and re-using the data. Through programming interfaces, the life-cycle information is automatically integrated into the Polychaetes Scratchpads, together with other data on polychaetes. Scratchpads are easy to use, adaptable, and provide powerful tools for managing biodiversity data. This taxon-centric virtual research environment allows browsing the taxonomic classification and retrieving various kinds of relevant information for each taxon, among which are also the collected biological traits.

Furthermore, the data are also accessible through Encyclopedia of Life's TraitBank which currently features over 3 million records related to more than 250 attributes for 272,720 taxa, including the Polytraits data. TraitBank serves as a provider for aggregated species trait data. All data uploaded there are archived and integrated with trait information from other sources to address issues of standardization of scientific data. This is the first complex database for marine organisms to be published in such an innovative way and demonstrates yet another example of collaboration between the data publisher Pensoft and Encyclopedia of Life.

On Tuesday 30 September 2014, the European Parliament Intergroup on "Climate Change, Biodiversity and Sustainable Development", in collaboration with the European Commission and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), organised a full day conference entitled: "Nature-Based Solutions: Innovation potential for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth in Europe."

Bringing together 140 participants including representatives from the European Institutions, local and regional authorities, research institutes, NGOs and International organisations, as well as private sector representatives, this conference aimed at promoting the solutions that nature can offer in tackling major challenges, such as climate change and natural disasters, in ensuring food security to an increasing population, in protecting the health of European citizens, and the conservation of biodiversity in the EU and at the global level.

XML markup of taxonomic research and specimen data is a valuable tool for structuring the incessantly accumulating biodiversity knowledge. It allows for the opportunity to collectively use the currently fragmented information for more detailed analysis.

A new research paper, published in theBiodiversity Data Journal, demonstrates how XML markup using GoldenGATE can address the challenges presented by unstructured legacy data, like those presented in the widely used PDF format. The paper demonstrates how structured primary biodiversity data can be extracted from such legacy sources and aggregated with and jointly queried with data from other Darwin Core-compatible sources, to present a visualization of these data that can communicate key information contained in biodiversity literature.

Specimen data in taxonomic literature are among the highest quality primary biodiversity data. Innovative cybertaxonomic journals such as the Biodiversity Data Journal are using workflows that preserve the data's structure and semantic specificity and disseminate electronic content to aggregators and other users that makes these data reusable.

Such structure however is lost in traditional taxonomic publishing and currently, access to that resource is cumbersome, especially for non-specialist data consumers.

The question is: how do you manage this vast distributed repository of knowledge about biodiversity to make it easily available reusable for future research?

To answer this challenge this project queried XML structured articles published in Biodiversity Data Journal along with historical taxonomic literature marked up using GoldenGATE, and represents the results as a series of standard charts. XML structured documents are maintained by the Swiss NGO Plazi and are freely available online.

In such form, data associated with specimens becomes much more valuable as it can reveal key information about a particular species, and even about the scientists who investigate them. Charts indicate at a glance, for example, what time of year and elevation range a species is likely to be found at, useful information if you want to search for it in the field.

Our accumulated biodiversity knowledge includes an estimated 2-3 billion specimens in natural history collections and 500 million pages of printed text. These are the data we need to answer questions that are relevant to our world today, like setting conservation priorities and anticipating the effects of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functions that affect the lives of people.

"In short, we have half a billion pages worth of biodiversity knowledge and are just learning how to query it. The real power comes when data from many articles are combined, queried, and reused for new purposes. Potential applications span the scientific, policy, and public spheres. When we all have better access to the information that already exists in the global corpus of biodiversity literature, this helps us do a better job of exploring what we don't know and wisely applying what we do." explains the lead author Dr Jeremy Miller, Naturalis Biodiversity Center.

###

This project was supported by pro-iBiosphere and EU BON, two FP-7 (European Union Seventh Framework Programme, 2007-2013) grants (No 312848 and 308454).

A recently completed benchmark survey of common plants provides a comprehensive dataset of vascular plant diversity and abundance in South Northumberland and Durham, contributing an additional 35,000 observations to the 200,000 observations collected by local recorders since the turn of the millennium.

Apart from contributing an updated inventory of vascular plant diversity, the survey is intended to be used as a reference point with which to identify change in the countryside and study the drivers of biodiversity change in the North-east of England.

Changes in the abundance of rare species have little impact on other species, but change in the abundance of common species can have cascading effects on whole ecosystems. The new survey provides a solid foundation that can be used to qualify the abundance of common species and compare against previous and future studies.

The distribution of heather predicted from the common plant survey data. This is one of the region's most characteristic species and one that many other organisms rely upon for food and cover.

The survey was part of the North-East Common Plants Survey Project, conducted over four years and required volunteers to go to various places. Some surveyed post-industrial brown-field sites, while others walked for miles across bleak moorland to reach sites high in the hills. Although these moors are arguably wilder and natural, the industrial wastelands turn out to be far more biodiverse.

Botanical surveying continues in the region despite the end of the project. Volunteers continue to monitor rare plants in the region and are currently working towards the next atlas of Britain and Ireland, coordinated by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland.

This survey is also among the first one to make use of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) functionality, jointly developed by EU BON and GBIF, that allows the easy export and exposure of datasets to maximize their discoverability and reuse. The survey was published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, providing easy and streamlined publication of GBIF data via a variety of newly introduced plugins.

Original Source:

Groom Q, Durkin J, O'Reilly J, Mclay A, Richards A, Angel J, Horsley A, Rogers M, Young G (2015) A benchmark survey of the common plants of South Northumberland and Durham, United Kingdom. Biodiversity Data Journal 3: e7318. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.3.e7318

EU BON has signed memoranda of understanding with almost thirty institutions and projects from across Europe and outside to state its desire for collaboration and exchange of expertise. Among the early partners in this list is the LTER-Europe group, focussed on the integration of scientific research  and ecosystem research approaches, including the human dimension.

Dr. Mark Frenzel who took part in the EU BON Third Stakeholder roundtable in December 2015, gives an overview of his impressions from the meeting as well as his ideas on the co-work between LTER-Europe and EU BON.

Credit: Florian Wetzel

Q: The LTER-Europe network looks at conceptualizing Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) as an essential component of world-wide efforts to better understand ecosystems. How is the network planning to achieve this?

A: This is / will be achieved mainly by funded project work. Actually the H2020 eLTER project is the most important backbone, an ESFRI eLTER initiative is running too. In terms of content there are several challenges which need to be addressed: (1) Harmonisation in terms of what and how is being measured at LTER sites, (2) collection and representation of metadata about sites, actors and data sets within the web tool DEIMS, (3) open access of data and DOI registration of data sets, (4) considering the human component as a major driver for changes in ecosystems by including socio-economy and socio-ecology in the LTER approach.      
 

Q: How would EU BON and its planned European biodiversity portal be beneficial to LTER-Europe and its aims in the next years?

A: Biodiversity is not the only, but an important focus within LTER. It depends on the services and benefits connected with this portal and its long-term perspective. The most important added value I would see in an elaborated framework-based agreement on the set of  "essential biodiversity variables" which will be a compromise between importance and feasibility. This selection process should be well tuned with the relevant players in this field.
 

Q: The LTER-Europe network includes several hundreds of sites that are collecting large amounts of data  – how can this data be used for improving our knowledge of biodiversity, particularly for policy-relevant questions?

A: The big advantage (and potential) of LTER-Europe sites is the coverage in terms of geography and bioms, the general shortcoming is in the heterogeneous reasons why these sites have been set up (e.g. for monitoring air pollution) and that there is no targeted funding (in terms of a specific research question) for all sites.

Not all sites are dealing with biodiversity data. First, suitable sites need to be selected according to metadata in DEIMS (https://data.lter-europe.net/deims/). Second, data sets according to fitting topics have to be compiled (perhaps no easy task, as datasets up to now are not exhaustively documented). Site managers of representative sites (depending on the question to be addressed) could be motivated to create a common standardised data sets (needs external funding depending on the resources necessary for the task or at least a very attractive research question) responding to e.g. policy needs. Moreover, the long-term knowledge of site coordinators about the development and the important drivers of change at their sites (e.g. by assessing ecosystem services) comprises valuable meta information about the context of data sets.

Data obtained from the sites could potentially help with policy-relevant questions like status of endangered species or status of ecosystem service relevant system parameters which could be extracted from LTER sites.
 

Q: According to you what are the next three most urgent step in order to achieve better understanding of ecosystem services and their benefits for policy, economics and society?

A: (1) reliable data and suitable scale of data, (2) understanding the effect of scale on ecosystem services, (3) make use of large networks to approach this issue, bring the results down to a scale understandable for the layman.
 

About LTER-Europe:

Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) is an essential component of world-wide efforts to better understand ecosystems. LTER contributes to the knowledge base informing policy and to the development of management options in response to the Grand Challenges under Global Change. From the beginning (around 2003) the design of LTER-Europe has focussed on the integration of natural sciences and ecosystem research approaches, including the human dimension. LTER-Europe was heavily involved in conceptualizing socio-ecological research (LTSER). As well as LTER Sites, LTER-Europe features LTSER Platforms, acting as test infrastructures for a new generation of ecosystem research across European environmental and socio-economic gradients.

A new report has been added to the dedicated EU BON Outputs Collection in the innovative RIO journal. The paper reviews biodiversity related citizen science in Europe, specifically the data mobilization aspect and gives an overview of citizen science related activities in the project EU BON.

In addition, recommendations for a Pan-European citizen science gateway and data mobilization efforts will be given, with the aim of filling in existing biodiversity data gaps. Also the EU BON citizen science gateway is described, which is a part of the European Biodiversity Portal (http://biodiversity.eubon.eu) with citizen science related products. 

Citizen science is a vital element for EU BON with regards to biodiversity information sources that provide data for research and policy-making. CS data are used by many research institutes, public organisations and local data portals. CS data offer volumes of field data, which would otherwise not be possible to collect with the limited resources of research institutes and agencies. Thus one of the main targets for EU BON is to make CS data available through various efforts, for example through networking and by using new technologies for data mobilisation. Overall, one of the main goals of a common EU citizen science Gateway is to integrate CS data for European biodiversity research. EU BON also seeks to develop a strategy for achieving this goal and encourages educational aspects of citizen science through networking and the development of tools.

Original Source:

Runnel V, Wetzel F, Groom Q, Koch W, Pe’er I, Valland N, Panteri E, Kõljalg U (2016) Summary report and strategy recommendations for EU citizen science gateway for biodiversity data. Research Ideas and Outcomes 2: e11563. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.2.e11563

iMarine e-Infrastructure for data driven decision making and research
iMarine  is organising an invitation-only workshop to discuss data driven decision making and research on 14th & 15th May 2013 at DG Connect, Avenue de Beaulieu 33 (BU33), Room 0/54, Brussels, Belgium.
The goal of iMarine is to facilitate policy makers in addressing the global challenges impacting on the marine ecosystem, the fisheries sector, local economies and communities and to demonstrate that science based policy making can benefit from a large and distributed e-Infrastructure for cross-disciplinary data collection, harmonization and analysis necessary for the management and conservation of marine living resources.

A key goal of the iMarine initiative is to support stakeholders in a sustainable use of the marine ecosystem. 

On 7th March 2014, iMarine is organizing an interactive workshop "iMarine data platform for collaborations" to showcase how its powerful data infrastructure is capable of addressing the challenges of the Ecosystem Approach. 

The workshop also offers important opportunities to work together on developing plans related to iMarine sustainability, such as the public partnership model concept, as well as engage new potential users and partners for the future. 

The workshop is co-located with the Fishery Dependent Information conference and will take place at Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) headquarters, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00153 Rome, Italy. 

Participation is free of charge but subject to registration. 

The Integrated Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER) Project will convene an Open Science Conference from 23-27 June 2014 in Bergen, Norway, with the goals of:

• highlighting research results from the IMBER project and activities,
• promoting integrated syntheses of IMBER-relevant research, and
• developing a new global research agenda for marine biogeochemistry and ecosystems in the Anthropocene.

The list of contributed sessions and workshops is available here.

The Call for Abstracts is open!  Deadline for abstract submission: 31 January 2014. Contributions are welcome from all marine research communities.

“We need to make sure that the hour of sunlight, of daylight, is in the evening so people’s mouths can be turned upwards in a smile,” Markey said in a recent video.

The post ‘More sun means more fun’: Markey makes another pitch for permanent DST appeared first on Boston.com.

"We're brothers for life.”

The post Jeremy Swayman set to reunite with Linus Ullmark, but as on-ice foes   appeared first on Boston.com.

Ullmark and Swayman shared an embrace ahead of Saturday's game at TD Garden.

The post Watch: Linus Ullmark shares hug with Jeremy Swayman, salutes Bruins fans in return to TD Garden appeared first on Boston.com.

“It's something that I'll look back at and bring with me forever."

The post Linus Ullmark relishes his return to TD Garden, especially after beating Bruins  appeared first on Boston.com.

The Bruins played a video tribute for Ullmark midway into the opening period.

The post Linus Ullmark wins in his return to Boston as the Senators top the Bruins in OT appeared first on Boston.com.

Their impact went far beyond the field.

The post Watch ‘Three Kings’: The story of Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, and the 2004 Red Sox appeared first on Boston.com.

“Go out there, represent the Red Sox, and become a challenge to the Yankees.”

The post What a Yankees fan recently told Pedro Martinez that became ‘personal’ appeared first on Boston.com.

Today is the 29th anniversary of the first performance of “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is currently the longest-running musical on Broadway. Andrew Lloyd ... Read more

The post “Phantom of the Opera,” Broadway’s longest running musical, marks 29th birthday appeared first on CMUSE.