Ecological niche modeling?that is, estimation of the dimensions of fundamental ecological niches of species?to predict their geographic distributions is increasingly being employed in systematics, ecology, conservation, public health, etc. This technique is often (of necessity) based on data comprising records…

This paper will discuss the development and role of the Convention’s Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM), its synergies with the Biosafety Clearing-House (BCH), and its support for bioinformatic initiatives in light of the Convention’s programme areas and cross-cutting issues. Within this context,…

Global climate change and its broad spectrum of effects on human and natural systems has become a central research topic in recent years; biodiversity informatics tools?particularly ecological niche modeling (ENM)?have been used extensively to anticipate potential effects on geographic distributions…

There is a disparity in availability of nomenclature change literature to the taxonomists of the developing world and availability of taxonomic papers published by developing world scientists to their counterparts in developed part of the globe. This has resulted in…

Online biodiversity portals and databases enabling access to large volumes of biological information represent a potentially extensive set of resources for a variety of user groups. However, in order for these resources to live up to their promise they need…

Comprehensive biodiversity surveys are unavailable for most Central and Eastern European countries. Although birds in general are well-studied, distributional information in the region is sparse and largely out-of of-date; I used museum specimen locality records and raster GIS data layers…

Environmental models are increasingly being used as surrogates to determine plant and animal species’ distributions for a range of uses. This use of models has become an important part of the recent science that has become known as biodiversity informatics.…

Natural history collections are the authoritative source of knowledge about the identity, evolutionary relationships, and attributes of species with which we share this planet. As such, collections of research specimens play a central and critical role in the conservation and…

Identification of organism names in biological texts is essential for the management of archival resources to facilitate comparative biological investigation. Because organism nomenclature conforms closely to prescribed rules, automated techniques may be useful for identifying organism names from existing documents,…

We argue that distributed mapping and analysis of biodiversity information becoming available on global distributed networks is a lynchpin activity linking together research and development challenges in biodiversity informatics. Online mapping is a core activity because it allows users to…