The jury of the 2026 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge (ENC) has selected four winning projects from Argentina, Belgium, Canada and Portugal. Entries came from 31 countries across six continents and covered a wide range of topics: DNA-based data, data mobilisation, AI, marine biodiversity, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, GIS workflows, Living Atlas tools, citizen science and invasive species, among others. The winners, announced at the 33rd GBIF Governing Board meeting in Oslo, Norway, will share the €20,000 prize pool equally.

Mapping marine species today and tomorrow

Among the winners is the team of Silas C. Principe, Pieter Provoost and Ward Appeltans from UNESCO’s Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), rewarded for the OBIS Species Distribution Models.

Initially developed within the MPA Europe project, the tool uses species distribution models (SDMs) to predict where more than 12,000 marine species occur in European waters, based on the relationship between occurrence records and environmental predictors. Beyond current distributions, it also projects how these ranges could shift by 2050 and 2100 under five Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) climate scenarios.

Users can explore the maps species by species through an interactive dashboard, while the underlying predictions are openly available as cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs via the AWS Open Data Registry, ready for reuse in research, marine spatial planning and conservation work.

Learn more

• OBIS announcement of the award
• OBIS Species Distribution Models dashboard
• OBIS SDM dataset on the AWS Open Data Registry
• About the Ebbe Nielsen Challenge

Congratulations to the OBIS team and to all 2026 winners!