The 2008 winner of the Ebbe Nielsen Prize is Dr Vince Stuart Smith from the Natural History Museum, London. Vince  is awarded the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), for his work on the development of Scratchpads which is a social cyber-networking tool that facilitates the networking of communities of scientists to build, share and publish digital biodiversity information in a simple and intuitive way. This work is already having significant impact not only on the way systematists conduct their work, but also on the efficient integration of these efforts into the cyber-taxonomy e-infrastructures being developed by initiatives such as GBIF and the European Distributed Institution for Taxonomy (EDIT).

The annual Ebbe Nielsen prize recognises a researcher who is combining taxonomy and biodiversity informatics research in an exciting and novel way.