Lifemapper is building a speciesdiversity map of the world. It is similar to the SETI@Home client, in that it uses a distributed computing client running primarily on home user's computers to correlate georeferenced biological samples with environmental models of the Earth. It is an experimental GIS, or Geographic Information System, that uses a special genetic algorithm to see if predicted rules about where a species lives match up with the species' observed natural settings. It is hopes that this technique will be able to both represent a current "map" of all organisms habitats on Earth as well as predict where organisms may possibly thrive or face extinction due to climate change and other ecological transformations.
Lifemapper harvests the geographical information associated with specimens and repurposes it as input data for predictive modeling of species distributions.
The Lifemapper project aims to highlight the role of biological collections institutions in the documentation of biological diversity by delivering specimen data to the desktops of PC users worldwide.
Lifemapper was created at the Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas in collaboration with USGS Biological Resources, the University of New Mexico, the University of California--Berkeley, California Academy of Sciences, the University of Massachusetts--Boston, and the Reference Center for Environmental Information (CRIA), Sao Paulo, Brazil.
"The new Lifemapper screensaver runs on Windows PCs [Win98 SE and later], and by donating their spare cycles people are directly helping to assemble a powerful, predictive digital library of Earth's biological diversity," said Jim Beach, assistant director for Informatics at the Biodiversity Research Center of the University of Kansas.
For example, using Lifemapper's predictions of animal and plant distributions, researchers will be able to model and simulate the spread of emerging diseases, plant and animal pests, or invasive species of plants and animals, as well as their effects on natural resources, agricultural crops, and human populations.
Once the set of rules is obtained, Lifemapper then identifies the regions on the map that match the rules in the mathematical model, that is, that match the preferred environment for the species.
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