Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic, species, and ecosystem level. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth; it is usually greater in the tropics as a result of the warm climate and high primary productivity in the region near the equator. Tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10% of Earth's surface and contain about 90% of the world's species. Marine biodiversity is usually higher along coasts in the Western Pacific, where sea surface temperature is highest, and in the mid-latitudinal band in all oceans. There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity. Biodiversity generally tends to cluster in hotspots, and has been increasing through time, but will be likely to slow in the future as a primary result of deforestation. It encompasses the evolutionary, ecological, and cultural processes that sustain life.
Citizen science is research conducted with participation from the general public, or amateur/nonprofessional researchers or participants for science, social science and many other disciplines. There are variations in the exact definition of citizen science, with different individuals and organizations having their own specific interpretations of what citizen science encompasses. Citizen science is used in a wide range of areas of study including ecology, biology and conservation, health and medical research, astronomy, media and communications and information science.
Biodiversity informatics is the application of informatics techniques to biodiversity information, such as taxonomy, biogeography or ecology. It is defined as the application of Information technology technologies to management, algorithmic exploration, analysis and interpretation of primary data regarding life, particularly at the species level organization. Modern computer techniques can yield new ways to view and analyze existing information, as well as predict future situations. Biodiversity informatics is a term that was only coined around 1992 but with rapidly increasing data sets has become useful in numerous studies and applications, such as the construction of taxonomic databases or geographic information systems. Biodiversity informatics contrasts with "bioinformatics", which is often used synonymously with the computerized handling of data in the specialized area of molecular biology.
Automated species identification is a method of making the expertise of taxonomists available to ecologists, parataxonomists and others via digital technology and artificial intelligence. Today, most automated identification systems rely on images depicting the species for the identification. Based on precisely identified images of a species, a classifier is trained. Once exposed to a sufficient amount of training data, this classifier can then identify the trained species on previously unseen images.
eBird is an online database of bird observations providing scientists, researchers and amateur naturalists with real-time data about bird distribution and abundance. Originally restricted to sightings from the Western Hemisphere, the project expanded to include New Zealand in 2008, and again expanded to cover the whole world in June 2010. eBird has been described as an ambitious example of enlisting amateurs to gather data on biodiversity for use in science.
Abraxas grossulariata is a moth of the family Geometridae, native to the Palearctic realm and North America. Its distinctive speckled coloration has given it a common name of magpie moth. The caterpillar is similarly coloured to the adult, and may be found feeding on the leaves of shrubs such as gooseberry and blackcurrant. The species was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae.
Plazi is a Swiss-based international non-profit association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital bio-taxonomic literature. Plazi is cofounder of the Biodiversity Literature Repository and is maintaining this digital taxonomic literature repository at Zenodo to provide access to FAIR data converted from taxonomic publications using the TreatmentBank service, enhances submitted taxonomic treatments by creating a version in the XML format Taxpub, and educates about the importance of maintaining open access to scientific discourse and data. It is a contributor to the evolving e-taxonomy in the field of Biodiversity Informatics.
The European Climate Assessment and Dataset (ECA&D) is a database of daily meteorological station observations across Europe and is gradually being extended to countries in the Middle East and North Africa. ECA&D has attained the status of Regional Climate Centre for high-resolution observation data in World Meteorological Organization Region VI.
Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) is a biodiversity informatics data standard that makes use of the Darwin Core terms to produce a single, self-contained dataset for species occurrence, checklist, sampling event or material sample data. Essentially it is a set of text (CSV) files with a simple descriptor (meta.xml) to inform others how your files are organized. The format is defined in the Darwin Core Text Guidelines. It is the preferred format for publishing data to the GBIF network.
iNaturalist is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applications. iNaturalist includes an automated species identification tool, and users further assist each other in identifying organisms from photographs. As of 24 February 2024, iNaturalist users had contributed approximately 172.751.520 observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide, and around 350,000 users were active in the previous 30 days.
Lavushi Manda National Park is a national park in the Muchinga Province of Zambia with an area of 1,500 sq km. It is the 11th largest of the 20 National Parks in Zambia. The park was initially gazetted as a Game Reserve in 1941, and was declared a National Park in 1972. It is located in a district of the same name (Lavushimanda), with the South Luangwa National Park in the neighbouring Mpika District. It is adjacent to Bangweulu Game Management Area to the northwest, Kafinda Game Management Area lies further west. The chiefdom of Chiundaponde is in the northwest, north lies Luchembe, northwest Chikwanda, east Mpumba, and south lies Muchinka chiefdom. It covers a small range of mountains and hills, and is principally covered in miombo woodlands, with a number of rivers and streams, and a few areas of grassland, both on drier land or in the form of seasonally wet dambos. There are few large mammals, due to poaching in the previous century, but fishing and hiking are possible. Certain antelope species retreat upland to the park from the Bangweulu swamps to the northwest during the rainy season.
iSpot is a website developed and hosted by the Open University with funding from the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) network with an online community intended to connect nature enthusiasts of all levels.
Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) is a putative set of parameters intended to be the minimum set of broadly agreed upon necessary and sufficient biodiversity variables for at least national to global monitoring, researching, and forecasting of biodiversity. They are being developed by an interdisciplinary group of governmental and academic research partners. The initiative aims for a harmonised global biodiversity monitoring system. EBVs would be used to inform biodiversity change indicators, such as the CBD Biodiversity Indicators for the Aichi Targets.
The City Nature Challenge is an annual, global, community science competition to document urban biodiversity. The challenge is a bioblitz that engages residents and visitors to find and document plants, animals, and other organisms living in urban areas. The goals are to engage the public in the collection of biodiversity data, with three awards each year for the cities that make the most observations, find the most species, and engage the most people.
Bhutan Biodiversity Portal(འབྲུག་སྐྱེ་ལྡན་རིགས་སྣ་འཆར་སྒོ།) is a consortium based citizen science website comprising key biodiversity data generating agencies and can be used by anyone. The portal is an official online repository of data on Bhutanese biodiversity.
The JosaphatBrownfield is a 25 ha (62-acre) piece of land located between Schaerbeek and Evere in Brussels. Once a marshalling yard between the Meiser railway station and the Evere railway station linking Schaerbeek and Halle, the brownfield has since developed into a biodiversity haven in the heart of the European Union's capital.
Myriophyllum heterophyllum is a species from the genus Myriophyllum native to North America. It was first described by André Michaux.
Anecdata.org is a citizen science web portal developed by the Community Environmental Health Lab at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Anecdata.org supports projects in the collection of observational data, primarily in environmental science, biology, and public health. Anecdata was founded in 2014 to provide a data management system for the citizen science projects run by the Community Environmental Health Lab and has since expanded to include more than 200 projects, where more than 8,000 registered users have contributed over 30,000 images and more than 50,000 observations. In addition to the desktop site, there is a corresponding mobile app that can be used to submit observations to existing projects. Anecdata.org also acts as a data repository where data can be stored, discovered, and shared to other users.
Mosquito Alert is a cooperative citizen science project, currently run as a non-profit and coordinated by four public research centers in Spain. The aim of the project is to study, monitor, and fight the spread of invasive mosquitoes transmitting global diseases such as dengue, Zika, Chikungunya or West Nile fever. The Asian tiger mosquito and the yellow fever mosquito are some of the invasive species that Mosquito Alert watches out for. The project provided the first detection of the Asian bush mosquito Aedes japonicus in Spain in 2018, providing the first report of a population of mosquitos that were located 1,300 km from their previously nearest known location in Europe.
