Megadiversity areas, with a high chance that a high
percentage of the extant species have still to be collected
once
Only a few years before many of these uncollected species
will be extinct due to extreme habitat loss
Very little current collecting
What collecting there is is usually done by Northern
specialists spending large amounts of money to visit for a short
while and collect a few species from a target group
Not enough professional taxonomists to do the primary
revisionary work
Steps towards a partial solution
Train local parataxonomists and informatics technicians
(students, park staff, etc)
Raise funds to send these collectors out
Get collections data up on the web within days
Integrate DNA sequence data, generated locally, within
weeks
Develop tools to rapidly integrate new data with old data
and to automate the generation of taxonomic revisions
In all the above, develop skills and empower a sense of
ownership in individuals of the megadiversity country
This site
Develop a comprehensive schema, useful for integrating
biodiversity informatics data from many sources
Provide easy access to the core data
Provide useful query tools
Act as a web-service (send with HTTP GET, receive XML)
Explore tools for automated description and revisionary work