Wednesday, October 18, 2000
The University Daily Kansan
Section A · Page 11
Researchers creating bio-database
By Travis Reed Special to the Kansan
The University of Kansas' Natural History Museum looks like any other building on campus: constructed of limestone with a rust-hued top that blends inconspicuously into the background with the onset of fall.
But inside, what University Biodiversity Center researchers are doing render the building behind the times — in more ways than one.
University researchers are spearheading an effort to change the way species diversity is researched and legislated.
"Basically, what we're doing is leading a national and international initiative to access all of the information associated with three billion plants and animals in the world's museums that've been collected in the past 250 years," said Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Biodiversity center.
The idea of the project, funded largely by $3 million in federal grants, is to create a comprehensive online database of species records.
The data will be used to predict how independent variables like climate change, invasive species and communicable diseases will affect a community. The information is available now, but it's disjointed and must be accessed manually.
If researchers wanted to predict how a phenomenon would affect a population without the software, they would have to visit each museum and search manually through its book of cataloged species, document the results and make predictions independently.
But in a few years, with the software being developed by KU researchers, they could access that information with a few clicks of a mouse.
Townsend Peterson, associate professor of biology and co-director of the program's development, said the country might have been saved from invasive species if this technology had been available years ago. These invasive species devastated industry and upset the equilibrium of their particular ecosystems. Medical researchers might have been pre-equipped to handle diseases such as the West Nile
virus; and the national landscape might be dandelion-free.
"It would be taking points where a species is known and relating those points to the geological and ecological background across the continent and asking what's special about these points that are known." Peterson said. "Once it has the model, we can predict things."
The hard part could be compiling all the information into a single comprehensive database. Peterson said the software had cataloged about 14 million specimens from 15 data sources. Another 30 sources are waiting to be connected, which would add about 36 million more species to the record.
Kristalka said he expected the database to be running at a fairly comprehensive and user-friendly level within a couple years. By that point, he said even lay persons could take advantage of the software for their own queries.
"Ultimately, we want to turn this Web facility into a public facility," Kristalka said. "To be a knowledge server for the public so they can, for example, type in their zip code and get an instant reading of
the animals and plants they should expect to find there."
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University researchers have garnered national acclaim for their work in this arena, and their proficiency has landed them space in many of the most well-respected scientific journals since the project began in 1997.
"Between 30 and 50 universities in the country have natural history museums of one kind or another," he said. "None of them have this kind of an informatics research initiative. And very few of them are even close to us in the very basic research of the composition and relationships of the animals and plants on the planet."
Krishtalka said he and other University researchers would be meeting in December with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to step up efforts in predicting the intrusion of foreign disease, and they are working on recently received grants from the Environmental Protection Agency to explore the prediction of invasive species and analyze optimum areas for wildlife conservation. Edited by Kathryn Moore
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