About Biodiversity
BioWired motivation
Biodiversity is a discipline that considers several
levels of organization of every living organism and the factors of the environment
that influence them. These levels are:
i) Genetic biodiversity: refers to the genetic characteristics of different
species.
ii) Species richness: this level refers to the study of the
presence of variety of species in a particular geographical area.
iii) Ecosystem diversity: Any ecosystem could change through several geographic
areas. This level of analysis refers to this fact.
Biodiversity also accounts for the relation between neighboring
species, the influence of geographic situation, human intervention through
aspects like exploitation, contamination, predation, and so on.
The increasing interest in this discipline is founded in the necessity of collecting and analyzing information for several purposes, either scientific, educative or economic. The term Biodiversity Informatics is the application of information technology to reach the following objectives:
i) Gathering, selection and administration of information: this is
crucial for granting correctness of any further effective study. The main
problems here are the amount of information, and its representation and distribution.
ii) Analysis, modeling and simulation: methodologies
of analysis, like data mining or statistics, must be modified or extended
in order to take advantage of the collected data.
Interesting links
BCIS, (1999) "Biodiversity Conservation Information System: Framework for Information Sharing", http://www.biodiversity.org
Stanley D. Blum (2000) "Overview of Biodiversity Informatics", http://all-species.org , http://www.calacademy.org/research/informatics/sblum/pub/biodiv_informatics.html
Community Biodiversity Network. What is Biodiversity
(2000) "Bio - what?", http://www.cbn.org.au/,
http://nccnsw.org.au/member/cbn/projects/EducationCentre/biodefn.html
Cotter, G., A., Bauldock, B., T., (2000) "Biodiversity Informatics Infraestructure: An Information Commons for the Biodiversity Community", Proceedings of 26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Cairo, Egypt, http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/vldb/CotterB00.html
Department Of Defense of United States of America,
"Conserving Biodiversity on Military Lands",
https://www.denix.osd.mil/denix/Public/ES-Programs/
Conservation/Biodiversity/biodiversity.html
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (1999), "Final report of the OECD Megascience Forum Working Group on Biological Informatics", http://bdi.cse.ogi.edu/background/
Schnase, J., L., (2000) "Reserch Directions in Biodiversity Informatics", Proceedings of 26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Cairo, Egypt, http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/vldb/Schnase00.html
Stockwell, D., R., B., (1997) "Overview of Computational Biodiversity Research", http://biodi.sdsc.edu, http://biodi.sdsc.edu/Doc/BIS/overview.html
Trombulak, S., C., (1996) "How to Design
an Ecological Reserve System", WildEarth Special Paper Number 1, pgs.
1-19,
http://community.middlebury.edu/~trombula/Reserves.html
BCIS - Biodiversity Conservation Information System, http://www.biodiversity.org
BIODI Software and Consulting, http://biodi.sdsc.edu
ITIS (Integrated Taxonomy Information System), http://www.itis.usda.gov
IUNC - The World Conservation Union, http://www.iucn.org
GBIF - Global Biodiversity Facility, http://www.gbif.org
Species Analyst, http://tsadev.speciesanalyst.net
WhyWhere?, http://biodi.sdsc.edu/www_home.html