Plans Underway for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility

There was a cool story in wired recently... as far back as 1996, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recognized a need to develop a facility in which plant and animal collections from around the world would be available to all of society. Hence, the beginning of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. From its location in Copenhagen, the GBIF will create an online database of 3 billion animal and plant specimens.

The Human Genome Project is expected to pale beside the GBIF, because that started with information being collected and stored on computers. With some of the specimens dating as far back as the 1770s, information to be gathered for the GBIF is "based largely on elaborate cursive script and paper tags." The goal of the GBIF is to combine the information in this database with that in other giant databases, such as climate records and geography. Get the whole Wired article at: Posted to Science-Biology | TrackBack