KDI Grant Funded

The LTER Network Office, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center have successfully collaborated in a proposal to the Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence program of the National Science Foundation.

The successful proposal, which was titled "A Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity: Building and Evaluating a Metadata-based Framework for Integrating Heterogeneous Scientific Data", received an Outstanding ranking and was featured in the NSF press release about the competition http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?pr9950.

The goal of the project is to enable scientists from a wide range of disciplines to address biocomplexity questions by providing for discovery, retrieval, interpretation, integration, and analysis of heterogeneous and distributed information about biodiversity and the earth’s ecosystems.

The participants in the KDI grant (LTER, NCEAS, and SDSC) have joined forces with University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center in the Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics.

The University of Kansas also is the recipient of a KDI grant that focuses on museum collections. One exciting result of the work at Kansas is the release of the web version of the Species Analyst by Dave Vieglais. This software allows anyone to access records from 12 museum collections with more being available in the near future. Taxa available are birds, mammals butterflies and plants, largely in North America. You can try this out at http://chipotle.nhm.ukans.edu/nabin/ For more information on the KDI project, contact Bob Waide or James Brunt.