Map of Life Charts Biodiversity
Want to find out where the world’s last remaining snow leopards live or what type of environment lemurs inhabit?
Check out the Map of Life, an ambitious web-based effort involving CU-Boulder researchers. Using information from field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involve scientists, conservation organizations and citizen scientists, the project aims to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” says associate professor Robert Guralnick of ecology and evolutionary biology.
The project’s success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs since subsequent versions of the mapping tool will offer ways for users to supply new or missing information about particular species.
Read more in the article by Jim Scott (EPOBio’73) in the Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine at.