Biodiversity informatics: automated approaches for documenting global biodiversity patterns and processes

Data about biodiversity have been scattered in different formats in natural history collections, survey reports and the literature. A central challenge for the biodiversity informatics community is to provide the means to share and rapidly synthesize these data and the knowledge they provide us to build an easily accessible, unified global map of biodiversity. Such a map would provide raw and summary data and information on biodiversity and its change across the world at multiple scales.