Powerful Yet Simple Technology Required to Discover Life

 
Discover Life aims to make identification guides and valuable information on a million species freely available.

What started as a project to catalog the species in Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become much more: a collaborative effort to account for all living things using Web-based identification and classification tools. John Pickering of the University of Georgia has built the site on Sun servers running the Solaris Operating System, many of which were provided in an equipment grant.

Though scientists have now mapped at least 30,000 genes contained in human DNA, entire species remain unknown. And it's not just a few species here and there. For instance, there are an estimated 100,000 species living in Great Smoky Mountains National Park alone. But fewer than 20,000 have been identified. The investment of human, financial, and technological capital required to catalog the remaining 80,000 unknown species is intimidating: Some projections put the cost at $100 million over 15 years.

Undaunted by these challenges, in 1997 a group that has since become the nonprofit group Discover Life in America (DLIA) started an All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) in the 800 square miles of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. The Smokies ATBI is made possible through cooperative agreements between the National Park Service and DLIA. An ATBI is a concentrated effort to determine all the species within a given area.

The goal of the Smokies ATBI is to help scientists understand why some areas have greater biological diversity than others, and to gauge rates of extinction. "Our purpose is to develop a foundation of knowledge about all species in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to better conserve and manage our natural heritage unimpaired today and for future generations," says John Pickering, Ph.D., who was the first chairman of Discover Life in America's board of directors and was instrumental in launching the ATBI.

Building the Right Tools

Although the project met with interest from the scientific community and attracted a large field volunteer force, the Smokies ATBI faced a significant logistical challenge. "We had about 2,000 volunteers, and while they were incredibly enthusiastic, they weren't particularly effective because they didn't have the ID tools they needed to figure out what they were collecting," recalls Pickering.

To address this problem, Pickering and his team created the Discover Life Web site, whose goal extends beyond the Smokies ATBI and which aims to make identification guides and valuable information on a million species freely available to educators, scientists, students, and all other interested parties. The site--supported by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Biological Information Infrastructure, the Polistes Foundation, and the University of Georgia, where Pickering is a faculty member in the Institute of Ecology--provides Web tools to assemble, process, and share text and images on invasive and other species.

The Web-based tools allow users with minimal training and technical knowledge to identify, report, and map species information. Using the IDnature Guides, scientists, volunteers, and even grade-school kids can correctly identify species by matching the sample they've collected to the descriptions and photos provided. Guides have been developed for arthropods, vertebrates, and plants. Others are being added incrementally.

After identifying species, users can map their location with the Global Mapper. This geographic information system (GIS) mapping application, developed in partnership with TopoZone, provides a database of maps and aerial photographs. After pinpointing the location of a species, users can then overlay maps with other data from a constantly expanding network of partners--for example, plant species from the Missouri Botanical Garden database.

Taking a pragmatic approach, Discover Life developers focused on building translators to manipulate and share information rather than attempting to drive adoption of new data standards. Using the tools available on the site, users can import data using Web forms and software that export to HTML, XML, RFC822 headers, or flat text files. The tools also support Excel, Access, and SQL databases, allowing users to integrate existing systems and data structures. The only application users need on their end is a Web browser.

Expanding to a Global Mission

With the Discover Life Web tools empowering ATBI volunteers and speeding the project ahead, Pickering began to consider broader applications. "I had a realization on a trip to meet with the South African Agricultural Research Council," he says. "The South Africans were supportive of conservation, but they were facing other problems. Specifically, nearly a third of their population was infected with HIV and they were losing half their agricultural production to pests. At that point, I recognized that we could expand the mission of Discover Life to provide general support for biological information around the world."

That realization led Pickering to cofound the Polistes Foundation in 2002. The nonprofit think tank is building a global network of partners that will provide expertise, resources, and infrastructure to assemble and share knowledge about nature to improve education, health, agriculture, economic development, and conservation throughout the world.

The more than 25 organizations in the Polistes Foundation network include the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. Geological Survey. The foundation's team of advisors is a veritable who's who of world leaders in science, education, conservation, and technology, including such luminaries as doctors Jane Goodall, Ernst Mayr, and Edward O. Wilson.

Today, the Discover Life site operates under the umbrella of the Polistes Foundation. Museums, herbaria, universities, and other institutions around the world continue to expand the species database that is the centerpiece of Discover Life's All Living Things portal. Pickering's goal for the global portal is to make it a comprehensive catalog of every living thing on the planet; he encourages anyone, anywhere to submit species information--using the Discover Life Web tools--for inclusion.

Looking ahead, the Polistes Foundation has set several ambitious goals for the next 10 years. The foundation will enable Web users to identify 1 million species by providing research protocols, K-16 curricula, and training courses to empower participants of any age or background to discover, study, and monitor species. The foundation will also establish a global network of ecological study sites to contribute data to help everyone from public health workers to conservation biologists protect and control species. The information that the foundation gathers will be freely available to anyone as an electronic encyclopedia of life through the All Living Things portal.

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