The Tailed Jay (Graphium agamemnon) is a predominantly green and black tropical butterfly that belongs to the swallowtail family. The butterfly is also called Green Spotted Triangle, Tailed Green Jay or the Green Triangle. It is a common, non-threatened species native to India, Sri Lanka through Southeast Asia and into Australia. Several geographic races are recognized (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bolivia has taken a giant step ,its more than 50,000 recently digitised records on the vertebrate fauna of Bolivia are now available to the public and specialists at the first Geospatial Center for Biodiversity of Bolivia (CGB). The record is available on  net and they allow access to technical data sheets of threatened species, geographical and spatial distribution, natural history, conservation status .

Biodiversity informatics

Biodiversity Informatics is the application of information techniques to biodiversity information for improved management, presentation, discovery, exploration and analysis. It typically builds on a foundation of taxonomic, biogeographic, or ecological information stored in digital form, which, with the application of modern computer techniques, can yield new ways to view and analyse existing information, as well as predictive models for information that does not yet exist . It is a relatively young discipline ( coined  around 1992) but has hundreds of practitioners worldwide, including the numerous individuals involved with the design and construction of taxonomic databases. The term “Biodiversity Informatics” is generally used in the broad sense to apply to computerized handling of any biodiversity information; the somewhat broader term “bioinformatics” is often used synonymously with the computerized handling of data in the specialized area of molecular biology.

Global list of all species

One major issue for biodiversity informatics at a global scale is the present absence of a complete master list of currently recognised species of the world.

Scenario in India

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is mentoring the Wildlife Institute of India to build a node for aggregating and sharing data about Indian biodiversity.This Indian data node will connect to other countries and agencies currently contributing to GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Informatics Facility.

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