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Hack for a Livable Planet: join OBIS at the World Bank-led hackathon to answer biodiversity issues using available data

Scientific organizations worldwide have collected local and global biodiversity data, sometimes for several decades. “We have historical datasets that date back to 1900,” explains Ward Appeltans, OBIS Programme Manager. “This long-term data is crucial for understanding change patterns and rates of ocean biodiversity loss.” Globally, hundreds of organizations are collecting, treating, storing, and making boundless quantities of biodiversity data available to everyone. Traditionally, scientists, researchers, conservationists, decision-makers, and industry professionals have been the biggest consumers of this stored data, utilizing it to better understand the Earth’s systems, inform, and make evidence-based decisions. With guidance, incentives, and collaborative processes, broader groups, such as citizens, could also utilize this publicly available data to highlight biodiversity issues, bring in new perspectives, and improve awareness from local to global levels.

Organized by the World Bank Group and supported by its evolving Livable Planet Observatory, “Hack for a Livable Planet” is a virtual hackathon encouraging diverse teams of all ages, genders, expertise, and backgrounds to explore and build new outcomes for publicly available biodiversity data. The event launched on 15 October 2024 and will run until mid-December 2024, with two phases of competition. The first phase will end on 11 November 2024. Participants can find more details on the hackathon’s FAQ page.

The hackathon is built around three main windows. “E-Packaging” aims at fostering powerful data-based narratives expressed through browser-based, dynamic digital formats such as storymaps, dashboards, webapps, infographics, interactive visualizations or audio & video experiences. “Policy Memo” seeks to channel biodiversity data into digestible, topic-focused memos advocating for policy change and aiming at real-world implementation. “Coding” is focused on developing free, open-source tools for analyzing public-domain data to get new insights on some relevant aspects of biodiversity, habitats, or ecosystems.

Dedicated hands-on resources from OBIS

Along with 11 other significant global scientific organizations, OBIS, a proud event partner, has developed specific tools to help the hackathon participants make the most of its 135 million ocean species occurrence records! Participants can get an overview of these resources in our dedicated video and below.

OBIS GitHub hackathon portal
In this portal, participants can find, for example, R code for retrieving and working with data subsets and dedicated packages for Python and R. Participants can also download a complete export of the OBIS database to your computer.

OBIS speciesgrids
We have developed the “speciesgrids”, a new dataset combining all OBIS and GBIF marine records in a gridded format. Using Uber’s H3 index system, speciesgrids allow for lightning-fast spatial queries and are delivered in a lightweight, user-friendly format—perfect for this hackathon!

R & Python notebooks
Our team has prepared a collection of R and Python notebooks to help participants access, clean, manipulate, and visualize biodiversity data effortlessly. Participants can download the notebooks or open them directly in Google Colab, which offers a seamless online Jupyter environment for running your code.

Binder
Participants can also use Binder, which supports JupyterHub and RStudio and allows executing our notebooks in the cloud.

It’s in the manual!
We have a comprehensive manual where participants who want to dive deeper into OBIS will find detailed guidance on accessing and using our data, step-by-step tutorials, and tips to enhance research. This manual was designed for beginners and experts alike!

We have more in stock!
The OBIS website is rich with additional resources that will be helpful to participants during this hackathon: the “Other Resources” section includes links and video guides to boost the participants’ data efficiency!

We can’t wait to see what is created with the OBIS data at the “Hack for a Livable Planet” hackathon!

More info https://spatialagent.org/BiodiversityHackathon/faq.html