Biodiversity Informatics - History of The Discipline of Biodiversity Informatics

History of The Discipline of Biodiversity Informatics

Biodiversity Informatics can be considered to have commenced with the construction of the first computerized taxonomic databases in the early 1970s, and progressed through subsequent developing of distributed search tools towards the late 1990s including the Species Analyst from Kansas University, the North American Biodiversity Information Network NABIN, CONABIO in Mexico, and others, the establishment of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in 2001, and the parallel development of a variety of niche modelling and other tools to operate on digitized biodiversity data from the mid 1980s onwards (e.g. see ). In September 2000, the U.S. journal Science devoted a special issue to "Bioinformatics for Biodiversity", the journal "Biodiversity Informatics" commenced publication in 2004, and several international conferences through the 2000s have brought together Biodiversity Informatics practitioners, most recently the London e-Biosphere conference in June 2009. A recent supplement to the journal BMC Bioinformatics (Volume 10 Suppl 14) published in November 2009 also deals with Biodiversity Informatics.