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The BioGeomancer Project
is a worldwide collaboration of natural history
and geospatial data experts. The primary goal of
the project is to maximize the quality and quantity
of biodiversity data that can be mapped in support
of scientific research, planning, conservation,
and management. The project promotes discussion,
manages geospatial data and data standards, and
develops software tools in support of this mission.
The BioGeomancer consortium is developing online
workbench, web services, and desktop applications
that will provide georeferencing for collectors,
curators and users of natural history specimens,
including software tools to allow natural language
processing of archival data records that were collected
in many different formats.
Over the past 250 years, biologists have gone into
the field to collect specimens and associated environmental
information documenting the range of life. The results
of these explorations are an irreplaceable archive
of Earth's biological diversity that plays a fundamental
role in generating new knowledge and guiding conservation
decisions. Yet, roughly one billion specimen records,
and even more species observation records, remain
practically unusable in their current form.
Georeferenced biocollection data is in high demand.
Mapping species occurrence data is fundamental to
describing and analysing biotic distributions. This
information is also critical for conservation planning,
reserving selection, monitoring, and the examination
of the potential effects of climate change on biodiversity.
Increasing the availability of georeferenced species
distribution data will vastly increase our ability
to understand patterns of biodiversity and to make
balanced conservation-related decisions. Most data
in these analyses come from natural history collections,
which provide unique and irreplaceable information,
especially for areas that have undergone habitat
change due to clearing for agriculture or ubanization.
We expect that BioGeomancer will have an immediate
positive impact on the availability of data from
natural history collections. BioGeomancer will bring
the cost to value ratio down to the point where
every collection that seeks to make its data public
will also seek to georefernce those records. For
example, for the ORNIS project, the existence of
BioGeomancer will make the difference between being
able to georeference only North American localities
and being able to georeference all of the localities
of bird specimen from 30 participating institutions
during the course of the project. On the global
scale, BioGeomancer will have an impact on standards
development within GBIF and the Taxonomic Database
Working Group, and the tools developed here are
explicitly targeted for interoperability with the
GBIF portal.
The BioGeomancer research consortium is coordinated
by the University of California at Berkeley and
is developing a universal system for geo-referencing
the diverse specimen records in natural history
collections.
Acknowledgements
The butterfly, beetle, shell and bottled fish images (courtesy Stuart Humphries) in this website were used with the kind permission of the Australian Museum. The purple flower specimen was used with the kind permission of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens.
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