Biodiversity Informatics

An upcoming discipline in science is the so-called "Biodiversity Informatics". This discipline is between taxonomy and informatics and tries to make available information about biodiversity according to the Convention on Biological Diversity. This includes information about the question:

How many species can we count on earth?

This seems to be an easy task, but even in well known regions we can find new species, and what makes the job really serious, in any region we have a loss of species through extinction. Counting the number of species is therefore necessary (not only for science) and attaching biological or ecological information to a species might be very important, even economically.

There are lots of initiatives for designing standards and for storing biodiversity information; there is a number of realizations of these standards into computer programs. One aspect, most of the initiatives follow, is the dissemination of all information in the World Wide Web. Then all experts can participate in collecting and managing biodiversity information about animals and plants.

And: information is not bonded to Northern hemisphere of the earth.