Tony Rees (scientist)

Tony Rees (Anthony J. J. Rees, b. Coventry, U.K., 1953) is a software developer, data manager and biologist resident in Australia since 1986, and previously a data manager with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research.[1] He is responsible for, among other systems, the c-squares spatial indexing method utilised in the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS, formerly the Ocean Biogeographic Information System) and AquaMaps,[2][3][4] subsequently adopted as a data exchange and collation standard by the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) of the European Commission;[5] the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG);[6][7] and the "Taxamatch" fuzzy matching algorithm for scientific names of organisms, which is incorporated into IRMNG and other systems, among them the iPlant Taxonomic Name Resolution Service, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), plus a range of associated databases.[8][9][10]

This article is about Tony Rees, the scientist and data manager. For Tony Rees, the Welsh footballer, see Tony Rees.
Members of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) team pictured at Rutgers University, 2004. L-R: Fred Grassle, Tony Rees, Phoebe Zhang

For his work in the area of biodiversity informatics including that on c-squares, OBIS, IRMNG and Taxamatch, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) awarded Rees the 2014 Ebbe Nielsen Prize.[11] Part of the accompanying 2014 citation from GBIF reads:

Ward Appeltans, OBIS manager at UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, said he was glad Rees’ life work, dedication and perseverance were rewarded by this prestigious prize. “Tony Rees has successfully combined two of his passions, informatics and biology, and with the right intuition and knowledge he has built solutions that have been used by thousands of scientists all over the world.”[11]

With the assistance of co-workers including the data management team (DMT) at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Belgium, Rees has continued to develop the content of IRMNG in particular; in a recent (2020) article in the journal Megataxa, the contents of IRMNG (as at March 2020) were used to generate "interim" listings and estimates for the numbers of all genera in the world.[12]

See also

References
  1. ORCID record: Tony Rees
  2. Rees, Tony (2003). "'C-squares', a new spatial indexing system and its applicability to the description of oceanographic datasets". Oceanography. 16 (1): 11–19. doi:10.5670/oceanog.2003.52.
  3. Tony Rees and Phoebe Zhang, 2007. "Evolving concepts in the architecture and functionality of OBIS, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System". in Vanden Berghe, E. et al. (ed.) Proceedings of Ocean Biodiversity Informatics: an international conference on marine biodiversity data management Hamburg, Germany, 29 November-1 December, 2004. IOC Workshop Report, 202, VLIZ Special Publication 37: pp. 167-176.(PLEN-18-03)]. Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 95 pp. ISBN 978-92-79-98374-0, doi:10.2760/335280
  4. Ready, Jonathan; Kaschner, Kristin; South, Andy B.; et al. (2010). "Predicting the distributions of marine organisms at the global scale". Ecological Modelling. 221 (3): 467–478. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2009.10.025.
  5. Willy Vanhee, Arina Motova & Antonella Zanzi (eds) (2018). Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries - 59th Plenary Meeting Report
  6. Rees, Tony (2008). "18.8. IRMNG—the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera" (PDF). The Proceedings of TDWG. 2008: 72–73.
  7. Rees, Tony; Vandepitte, Leen; Decock, Wim; Vanhoorne, Bart (2017). "IRMNG 2006–2016: 10 years of a global Taxonomic Database". Biodiversity Informatics. 12: 1–44. doi:10.17161/bi.v12i0.6522.
  8. Rees, Tony (2014). "Taxamatch, an algorithm for near ('fuzzy') matching of scientific names in taxonomic databases". PLOS ONE. 9 (9): e107510. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107510. PMC 4172526. PMID 25247892.
  9. Boyle, Brad; Hopkins, Nicole; Lu, Zhenyuan; et al. (2013). "The taxonomic name resolution service: an online tool for automated standardization of plant names". BMC Bioinformatics. 14: 16. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-14-16. PMID 23324024. S2CID 2731008.
  10. Vandepitte, Leen; Vanhoorne, Bart; Decock, Wim; et al. (2018). "A decade of the World Register of Marine Species – General insights and experiences from the Data Management Team: Where are we, what have we learned and how can we continue?". PLOS ONE. 13 (4): e0194599. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0194599. PMC 5889062. PMID 29624577.
  11. "CSIRO's Tony Rees named 2014 Ebbe Nielsen Prize winner". GBIF. Retrieved 10 December 2018.
  12. Rees, Tony; Vandepitte, Leen; Vanhoorne, Bart; Decock, Wim (2020). "All genera of the world: an overview and estimates based on the March 2020 release of the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG)". Megataxa. 1: 123–140. doi:10.11646/megataxa.1.2.3.
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