The Missouri Botanical Garden has opened a Center for Biodiversity Informatics.
A relatively new field, biodiversity informatics is the creation, integration, analysis and understanding of information regarding biological diversity.
Efforts are underway to make the vast, decentralized resources of global biodiversity information available in digital form, but imposing consistency and compatibility among the scores of searchable databases on the world's biota is an enormous challenge, Missouri Botanical Garden officials said.
The new Center for Biodiversity Informatics is led by Director Chris Freeland and funded through $3.9 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies and private foundations, said Julie Bierach, a garden spokeswoman.
CBI, which has five employees and three project-based consultants, will work with researchers around the world to mobilize biodiversity data to support scientists' research; increase usability of biodiversity information by advocating the open and transparent publication of data; and encourage responsible stewardship of biodiversity information through adoption of community standards, according to Missouri Botanical Garden officials.
"By putting this core information about what plants exist on the planet, and detailed information about where they're collected and the environment around them, you give this wealth of data that can be inserted in other people's scholarship for studies like conservation assessments, tracking invasive species, land management practices, and many other kinds of research," Freeland said in a statement. "This really is core science that other researchers need to have access to, and we're making those data available for that use."
One of CBI's recently funded projects is "Digitizing Engelmann's Legacy" online. Dr. George Engelmann, an American botanist and St. Louis physician is the founder and long-time president of the St. Louis Academy of Sciences. He encouraged garden founder, Henry Shaw, to develop the Missouri Botanical Garden to be of scientific, as well as, public use. The Missouri Botanical Garden has been funded to digitize and create an online public display of the Engelmann herbarium of plant specimens. The approximately 8,000 specimens gathered during pioneering expeditions into the American west following those of Lewis and Clark are the first scientific records of the plants growing in the vast wilderness west of the Mississippi River, garden officials said. The collection forms the earliest verifiable documentation of species occurrences before the rapid migration west permanently altered the landscapes through human introduction of non-native invasive species.
In September, Dr. Peter Raven is stepping down after 40 years as garden president. Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson, director of the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland in Dublin, will succeed him.
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