@nicolekearney
Communications Director @biodivlibrary.bsky.social. Manager @bhl-au.bsky.social. Chair of Team #RetroPIDs. Member of #HomewardBound #TeamHB9. Striving to make biodiversity knowledge accessible & discoverable online. #OpenAccess #StripedPossums 🌱 📚 🦘👩💻 🔗
A brown possum with a long black stripe down its back clinging to a tree branch.
BEST NEWS EVER: This spectacularly beautiful creature has not been extinct for 6,000 years; it’s been clinging on in the rainforest of remote West Papua. The world has more Striped Possums than we thought!
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
This is what has kept me up at night (and completely abuzz) over the past 10 months. And now I can sleep. 🐝
Hi - at UNEP-WCMC. Our own historical work was digitised onto the Biodiversity Heritage Library. We don't have a physical library any more.
We're counting down the hours. Please help if you can. 🧪
An open book featuring coloured illustrations of butterflies
An open book featuring coloured illustrations of fish
An open book featuring coloured illustrations of pink flowers
An open book featuring a coloured illustration of a protea flower
Hey, I’ve spent the past 5 years leading BHL’s #RetroPIDs project, which is all about making journal content more discoverable, regardless of how pretty it is. It just makes this critical work more enjoyable (for me) when it contains spectacular #SciArt.
A dolphin in the ocean
A pod of dolphins in the ocean
A pod of dolphins in the ocean
Turquoise waves breaking on a sandy beach. There are islands in the background.
Day #5 in Tanzania: today I travelled from Zanzibar’s southern tip to its west, where I’ll be departing for Chumbe Island, an IUCN listed nature reserve & #GlobalBiodiversityHotspot known for its ecological innovation & exceptional coral reefs. Meanwhile, here are some dolphin pics from yesterday.
A boat in the water with a red sunset.
Four water birds standing in shallow water silhouetted against a sunset
A group of tiny sea anemones in shallow water
A coastal scene at low tide with deeper pools of seagrass and algae in the foreground.
Day #3 in Tanzania: Kizimkazi, a secluded beach on the southern coast of Zanzibar. #HomewardBound #iNaturalist
A leafy path through green forest
The white, black and pink face of a baby Zanzibar Red Colobus monkey peeking through leaves.
A brown and rufous elephant shrew in vegetation
A brown elephant shrew in vegetation
Day #2 in Tanzania: The beautiful UNESCO & IUCN listed Jozani Forest (the only national park in Zanzibar): monkeys & elephant shrews #HomewardBound @inaturalist.bsky.social
A coast scene, a walkway lined with palm trees and an ocean filled with boats. The sun is starting to set.
A market stall with bananas, avocados, pineapples and mangoes.
A concrete bench with 5 cats asleep
A bright green chunky grasshopper.
Day #1 in Tanzania in the lead up to the 2025 #HomewardBound Leadership Summit. Zanzibar: ocean, islands, boats, Stone Town, markets, spices, cats & the first observations for our HB #iNaturalist project: www.inaturalist.org/projects/hom...
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has donated to BHL’s Fundraising Campaign so far! 💚 Your generosity will help us build an independent, sustainable future for open biodiversity knowledge. 🌿 📖 🌏 🧪
Every gift helps:
🔗 ancrywkv.donorsupport.co/page/BHLDona...
#ILoveBHL #OpenAccess
An owl in a tree on a black background + green round earrings featuring a red back spider.
All ready for my 2am meeting with the BHL global consortium on this #Halloween Eve. We were instructed to dress for the holiday, so I’ll be sporting my glow-in-the-dark owl t-shirt & red-back spider earrings. #BHLib
Thank you!
A person presenting on a stage in front of a slide featuring text and two pages of an historic publication.
A person presenting on a stage in front of a slide featuring text and a logo.
📣 Calling all biodiversity institutions! Meise Botanic Garden is supporting the continuation of BHL by auditing/cancelling non-Open Access journal subscriptions & diverting all saved funds to BHL. Patricia Mergen encourages other institutions to do the same 🧪 🌱🌎 #LivingData2025 #OpenAccess #ILoveBHL
A person standing in front of a presentation slide, which features text and a photo of books, one open in front.
A person giving a presentation in front of a slide showing text and a map of dots.
A person giving a presentation in front of a slide showing text and an OpenAI prompt.
A person giving a presentation in front of a slide showing text and a table of purple lines.
Ben Scott @nhm-london.bsky.social shares how his team has extracted trait data from species descriptions on BHL. Result? 706,842 trait terms & the largest trait database in the world. BHL = the foundation of our understanding of biodiversity. #LivingData2025 @biodivlibrary.bsky.social
A person standing in front of a presentation slide, which features text and a photo of books, one open in front.
A person giving a presentation in front of a slide showing text and a map of dots.
Trait data is crucial to our understand of biodiversity & informing how species respond to climate change. So much of this essential data is in BHL, captured in species descriptions in the literature. Says Ben Scott @nhm-london.bsky.social at #LivingData2025 @biodivlibrary.bsky.social #ILoveBHL 🌱🧪🌿
But, you can use birds as a vehicle to collect/identify “ugly” species. Rudolf Meier shares an example from Singapore, where 1500 lice were collected from 54 roadkill birds, resulting in the discovery of 50 new lice species. #LivingData2025 #EmbraceTheUgly
The solution to our biodiversity knowledge bias? Rudolf Meier shares @mfnberlin.bsky.social’s Biodiversity Knowledge Factory, which uses robotic specimen handling and imaging, and artificial intelligence for data extraction to describe “ugly” species at scale. 🪰 🪱 🪳 🦟 #LivingData2025
Rudolf Meier paraphrases a post from @rdmpage.bsky.social : as ~ 2/3 of the records in GBIF are birds, @gbif.org is primarily a Global Bird Information Facility. To correct this bias, we need to focus on the “ugly” biodiversity. 🪰 🪱 🪳 🦟 @mfnberlin.bsky.social #LivingData2025 x.com/rdmpage/stat...
10 people standing in from of a presentation screen, each making the shape of a “W” with their hands.
The wonderful speakers from @tiagolubiana.bsky.social’s #Wikimedia & #BiodiversityData session at #LivingData2025 (we also had the fabulous @siobhanleachman.bsky.social online). 🧪🔗🌎👩🏼💻 @rdmpage.bsky.social @svmering.bsky.social @biodivlibrary.bsky.social @wikimediafoundation.org
A photo of Jane Goodall, alongside a quote
Most scientists are not great at communicating their science, says Dean Pentcheff #LivingData2025. #ScienceCommunication is effective when we use narratives. Tell your story. Then you’ll get into people’s hearts. #JaneGoodall
Lauren Oakes shares how Adventure Scientists gathers data to address critical environmental challenges, such as amassing the largest and most diverse global microplastic pollution datasets & using #TreeTracking to prevent illegal logging. Find out more: www.adventurescientists.org #LivingData2025 🧪
Rod Page @rdmpage.bsky.social shouts out the crucial work of BHL’s Persistent Identifier Working Group (Team #RetroPIDs), who’ve retrospectively assigned 50,000+ DOIs to historic journal articles, which have been cited 74,446 times, giving BHL an H-index of 79. #LivingData2025 @crossref.bsky.social
Rod Page @rdmpage.bsky.social spoke today at #LivingData2025 about journals that disappear from the web. To learn more about his example: the hijacking and fraudulent DOI Assignment of The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, see our BHL blogpost: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2022/10/jour...
Britt Andermann talks about the importance of archival materials (field notes, journals, registers, and excursion reports) as critical sources of biodiversity data, and shares a process for extracting this data and making it accessible & discoverable @gbif.org. #LivingData2025 🧪📚
That might/should be because the 1799 platypus description has a DOI. Anyone citing it should use the DOI. #RetroPIDs
It’s #WombatDay! And I just happen to be wearing my favourite wombat earrings. #DenzandCo denzandco.com #LivingData2025
Wikipedia has 76,413 links to BHL pages. Wikispecies has 71,876. Rod Page @rdmpage.bsky.social shares which of those pages are the most viewed on each platform. #LivingData2025
Mike points out that as a result of this improvement to the Biodiversity Heritage Library catalogue, he produces an error report that can help improve #Wikidata. This is a great example of how reuse of Wikidata can bring about improvements to Wikidata. #RoundTripping #LivingData2025
Rod Page @rdmpage.bsky.social asks which of BHL’s 63 million pages are the most important. Clearly the most important page on BHL is the first scientific description of the platypus 😉: doi.org/10.5962/p.30... #LivingData2025 #ILoveBHL #RetroPIDs
The transition of BHL from the Smithsonian is an opportunity to rethink the BHL and to explore its relationships with other projects (e.g. Wikis). @rdmpage.bsky.social shares his test bed for exploring new interfaces at #LivingData2025
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