The mapping and tracking of biodiversity is an important subfield of Biology. The goal is to understand the salient characteristics of ecosystems and their interactions with the diversity of species and genetics of .flora and fauna. Three components in the workflow of biodiversity scientists: information acquisition, collaborative collection curation, and effective dissemination of biodiversity research results will be studied. Interconnected prototypes will be constructed for each of these activity thrusts. The acquisition work will focus on data collection in the field, and on enabling data-related collaboration among small groups of researchers during expeditions. The grant recipients will design novel interfaces for small devices such that power is conserved, data navigation effort is minimized, and screen space is expanded by virtually placing shared information piles in space. Collaborative curation efforts will create ColCura, an infrastructure for federating biodiversity collections. The novel feature of this system will be that researchers everywhere can contribute artifacts, but also metadata about existing collection items. This work will particularly exploit the geo-referencing of information to connect otherwise disjoint data items. Dissemination-related activities will develop novel methods for semi-directed browsing of biodiversity information. The research team will combine a mixture of constraint satisfaction methods and dynamic linkage of information items into a novel browser that is specialized to biodiversity data. One of this browser's main goals will be to encourage serendipitous discovery.
Biodiversity research by its nature greatly impacts all nations and their inhabitants. The localized, long-term studies at Jasper Ridge provide invaluable detailed insight into the effects of development on plant and animal life. At Stanford the work will offer unique opportunities for Biology students to interact with their peers in Computer Science. The California Academy directly helps 3rd World nations understand economic tradeoffs that involve their natural resources. Global trade and travel speed the spread of biological change across the globe. Accelerating our efforts to understand these changes is therefore of increasing urgency.
