Rob Guralnick has received an NSF Grant entitled Map of Life: An infrastructure for integrating global species distribution knowledge. This new collaborative research award is from NSF Advances in Biological Informatics and is split between Rob and Walter Jetz at Yale University. The award amount is $990K over three years, with $531K going to Yale and $459K going to Boulder.
Abstract
Despite hundreds of years of active exploration, human knowledge of the distribution of biodiversity remains very limited. A fundamental factor in this shortcoming is that the majority of direct and indirect information about species’ distributions has not been mobilized and integrated. While researchers can readily access fine-scale environmental data with global coverage, access to integrated species distribution information at validated precision remains elusive. Investigators at Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder are awarded a grant to develop an interactive, online species distribution workbench and knowledge-base – called the ‘Map of Life’ - as the fundamental mechanism for documentation, integration, and advance of human biodiversity distribution knowledge.
Congratulations to Rob!
