iNaturalist Observations: In and Around Copenhagen (22-31 March 2026)

Nesting Mute Swan

I attended the 2026 GBIF Midterm meetings in Copenhagen in March 2026. I added on a few days of holiday to visit some of my favorites in the city.

The weather wasn't really good for a lot of observations and I didn't get out of the city, so many of my observations were of birds (especially around the Lakes). 

Total: 23-31 March 2026 (as of 1 April 2026)

• Observations: 89

• Species: 38

Notables

• Eurasian wigeon (Mareca penelope)

• Great Tit (Parus major)

• Deer (partial jaw)

Here are all my observations from various trips to Denmark: Denmark: My Observations

Jaw of a species of Dear

First Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) observation of the year

 

Last year, I made my first Lycorma delicatula observation on 13 April 2025. This year, it was 10 days earlier (3 April 2025) in nearly the same spot. With the large number of (visible) egg masses in my neighborhood, I fear it will be another booming year. 

In 2025, I made 1,519 observations in Arlington, Virginia.

Two biodiversity/bioinformatics meetings in Belgium and the Netherlands (2-4 April 2015)

As Program Director for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, I participated in many meetings around bioinformatics. In April 2015, two important meetings were held in Oostende (Belgium) and Leiden (Netherlands).

The first of the two meetings took place in Oostende. The meeting was the Catalogue of Life Mini-Symposium held at the Vlaams Instituut Voor de Zee (VLIZ). In addition to staff from the Catalogue of Life, Donald Hobern (GBIF), David Remsen (Marine Biological Lab), and Tom Orrell (Smithsonian/ITIS) were attending. 

At the Symposium, I gave the following presentation:

Kalfatovic, M. (2015, April 2). Looking Forward: The Biodiversity Heritage Library. Catalogue of Life Mini-Symposium (CoL), Oostende (Belgium). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19393206

The weather in Oostende was challenging, high winds and rain; we also had to take a short ferry ride to the meeting space. All the things that make biodiversity meetings special.

Following the meeting in Oostende, many of the group moved on to Leiden for a focused meeting on the work of BHL, EOL, ITIS, and GBIF. In addition to those at the CoL meeting, Bob Corrigan (EOL), Peter Schalk (CoL/GBIF) were in attendance. The meetings were held in the offices of Naturalis, then still in their temporary quarters in the Pesthuis before moving to their new building.

Group photos are always a great part of the meeting, here, we posed as Dutch Masters:

I was also able to take a bit of personal time and visited Amsterdam, Ghent, and the fabulous tulip gardens of Keukenhof.

Meeting: 2014 BHL Technical Meeting (2-3 April 2014, St. Louis)

The 2014 Spring CNI meeting was being held in St. Louis and it seemed like a good opportunity to save on travel expenses and add on a BHL. 

We scheduled the BHL meeting for 2-3 April, right after CNI. BHL gathered the staff involved in technical development at the Missouri Botanical Garden. It was a useful meeting to cover key topics during the ongoing technical transition of BHL.

We stayed, as was often the case, at Trelease House, the apartment building the Missouri Botanical Garden provides for academic and research visitors. On the night of April 3, I woke up at 05:30 to my phone making emergency alert sound. 

Tornado warning in area with one spotted nearby (near the Ritz Carlton where CNI was in fact). Get up and out to main room. My suitemates were unaware of alert, so I got everyone up and we all go to shelter just as sirens go off outside and loudspeakers shout "take shelter immediately". Can't get to basement from front of building, so we go under stairs. I get messages from other BHL staff in other rooms that they're all sheltering. 

Group photo with World's Fair Donuts

Later that day, when we go to dinner in a downtown restaurant, there is another tornado warning and we all have to head to the basement of the restaurant for about 20 minutes.

 

Doug Holland (right) giving a tour of the Rare Book Collection (with Kia Siang Hock from the National Library Board, Singapore)

When there wasn't a threat of tornados, the Missouri Botanical Garden was looking great as springtime was underway.

Views of the Missouri Botanical Garden

Publication: Geocoding LCSH in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Code4Lib Journal Issue 2 (March 24, 2008)

One of the first publications on BHL was initiated by Chris Freeland (BHL Technical Director) and the tech team at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) and published in the then still pretty new online journal, Code4Lib Journal. I also contributed enough for author credit.

The map, created using the methodology outlined in the article, was a feature of the BHL website for a number of years. 

Figure 3: Google Map with geocoded LCSH from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Abstract: Reusing metadata generated through years of cataloging practice is a natural and pragmatic way of leveraging an institution’s investment in describing its resources. Using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the Biodiversity Heritage Library generates new interfaces for browsing and navigating books in a digital library. LCSH are grouped into tag clouds and plotted on interactive maps using methods available within the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API). Code examples are included, and issues related to these interfaces and the underlying LCSH data are examined.

"Geocoding LCSH in the Biodiversity Heritage Library," with Chris Freeland, Jay Paige, Martin R. Kalfatovic, and Marc Crozier. Code4Lib Journal Issue 2 (March 24, 2008). URL.

Meeting: 2010 BHL Institutional Council Meeting (21-22 March 2010, New York City)

The 2010 BHL Institutional Council meeting was held in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History, 21-22 March 2010, hosted by AMNH Library Director, Tom Baione.

This was one of the most intense of the leadership meetings from the early days. The meeting itself was only one day, 22 March. People arrived on the 21st and there were some informal meetings over dinner that outlined some governance workings that were formalized at the meeting the next day.

The key move was to delay the scheduled Executive Committee election by temporarily suspending the BHL Bylaws (my knowledge of Roberts Rules of Order helped me figure out the proper way to do this. Doug Holland formalized the process by moving that the election be suspended and the current Executive Committee remain in place while a new bylaws task force convene. This had the benefit of avoiding a certain, and embarrassing, election loss by a key BHL partner and keeping a strong team in place (Cathy Norton, Connie Rinaldo, Doug Holland).  

We also had a presentation on fund raising from the AMNH development team. There were grand plans for a cooperative fund raising effort, but that eventually died due to opposition from individual institutional fund raising priorities.

I also helped to organize how we could count partner "in kind" contributions, a tool that lasted for many years. Martin: put together Member Contribution document. He wants to know if it makes sense and asks that we send suggestions about how and what to report.

There were good reports from Bianca (Lipscomb) Crowley on collections and issue tracking, and scanning operations at partners. Chris Freeland gave a technical update, including usage of the BHL site. BHL Program Director Tom Garnett gave a full financial report. At this point, BHL was in Year 3 of the MacArthur grant with two years left to go. As Tom noted, "BHL needs to get years 4 and 5 right!"

In an update on global BHL activities, Graham Higley (NHM London and Encyclopedia of Life) reported on BHL Europe and other projects. It was proposed a group be formed to monitor/expand those efforts. Nancy Gwinn (Smithsonian), proposed the group be called the BHL Global Coordinating Committee which ended up sticking. Chris Freeland was keen to ensure that BHL come up with a way to ingest content from a variety of providers around the world.

Meeting: Catalogue of Life Global Team Meeting (19-21 March 2019, Champaign, IL, Illinois Natural History Survey)

BHL had worked with the Catalogue of Life (CoL) for a number of years and I had attended CoL meetings in various locals in the past.

This meeting was held in Champaign, IL, at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS). The INHS is the home base for the Global Names Architecture (GNA) team (since they moved from Woods Hole a while back). It was great to see Dmitry (Dima) Mozzherin and Geoffrey Ower. 

The meeting also gave me a chance to catch up with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) BHL team of Kelli Trei and Susan Braxton. 

From Left: Peter, Dima, Olaf:

Ed DeWalt (INHS) was the host of the meeting that included other key players including Peter Schalk (CoL/Naturalis), Tom Orrell (ITIS/Smithsonian), Yury Roskov (Species 2000), Markus Doering (GBIF), Leen Vandepitte (WoRMS), David Remsen (Marine Biological Lab), Olaf Bánki (CoL), Chuck Miller (Missouri Botanical Garden), and others.

It was also great to walk around the UIUC campus which I visited a number of times for both BHL and other digital library work.

I gave the following presentation on BHL to the group.

• Kalfatovic, M. (2019, March 21). BHL &The Catalogue of Life. Catalogue of Life Global Team Meeting, Champaign, IL (Illinois Natural History Survey). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19037959