Ebbe Nielsen - Career

Career

Following writing a volume on the moth family Elachistidae and working on the checklist of Danish Lepidoptera, Nielsen was invited through the University of Copenhagen to participate in a six-month expedition to South America. The trip commenced in 1978 and focused on extensive biodiversity surveys of the Patagonia region. Nielsen managed much of the expedition and was involved with it for the whole of the period, one of only two of the original fifteen scientists to see the project through to completion. The experience provided him with considerable material for his PhD and he developed an appreciation for the fauna of the southern hemisphere, where he would live for the next two decades.

Nielsen acquired his PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 1980. A year later, he was engaged by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to work in Australia on primitive Lepidoptera and other Lepidoptera inventories. He focused less on pure research after 1990, when he was appointed director of the Australian National Insect Collection in Canberra. He was instrumental in the establishment of CSIRO Publishing in 1996, and in particular the journal Invertebrate Taxonomy (known as Invertebrate Systematics since the beginning of 2002). He chaired the editorial committee for the journal and was a frequent contributor.

Nielsen enthusiastically advocated for a comprehensive repository of data on species and their characteristics, recognising informatics as a key to understanding and managing biodiversity. During the 1990s, he and other scientists pushed for an extensive global biodiversity resource, designed to utilise up-to-date informatics software and capable of collating data held on various separate databases. In 1999, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development endorsed a proposal for the establishment of a global biodiversity information system, and on 1 March 2001, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility organisation was officially launched. As Australia's Head of Delegation for the GBIF and a founding member, Nielsen was en route to Montreal to attend the first meeting of the governing board when he died of a heart attack.

The Karl Jordan Medal for lepidopterology was awarded to Nielsen by the Lepidopterist' Society in 1990, and he was later a member of the award committee. That same year he was the recipient of the David Rivett Medal from the Australian Academy of Science, and in 1992 of the Ian Mackerras Medal, awarded to him by the Australian Entomological Society. Nielsen was a member of several committees, societies, and advisory boards, was a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

As an author and co-author, Nielsen published eight books and monographs, and as an editor and co-editor, was involved with many more. He was also the author of over eighty other published pieces, mostly research and academic papers. The majority of his publications were on the topics of systematics, Lepidoptera, biological inventories, biodiversity, and informatics.