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