Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics

Symposium: Key Innovations in Biodiversity Informatics

Lifemapper: Mapping and Predicting the Distribution of Life with Distributed Computation , James Beach (The University of Kansas).

Lifemapper is a digital library that serves species distribution data on a global scale. Using a distributed Internet query architecture to retrieve georeferences from biological specimen databases in museums worldwide, we create maps and predictive models of species ranges based on environmental correlations with locales where species are known to occur. To parallelize the computation of each independent species prediction we created a screen-saver client that performs predictive analyses on desktop computers before uploading the resulting model to the Lifemapper server. Lifemapper uses the GARP algorithm (Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production), ESRI's ArcIMS (Internet Map Server), ArcSDE (Spatial Database Engine) and Microsoft's SQL Server as its primary software components.

Visit Lifemapper website at http://www.lifemapper.org/.



Organization:
Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental

Sponsorship:
Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF Sistema Integrado de Informação Taxonômica, ITIS*Brasil Species 2000 International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases, TDWG U.S. Geological Survey, USGS Petrobras Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, Fapesp Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa, CNPq Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, MCT