Background

The crisis

• 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