Contact: Ed Wiley, (785) 864-4038; David Vieglais, (785) 864-7792; Townsend Peterson, (785) 864-3926; or Brad Kemp, (785) 864-4540.
LAWRENCE - Researchers at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center have won $1 million in grants that will advance work to count all the living creatures in the sea, museum director Leonard Krishtalka announced today.
The grants are part of a project called the Census of Marine Life, administered by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program and funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York and a consortium of federal agencies including the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.
The project awarded a total of $3.7 million to eight projects nationwide, including two at KU.
Ed Wiley, KU curator of fishes and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, is leading a project called Fishnet, which received a $500,000 award. Fishnet - on the Web at habanero.nhm.ku.edu/fishnet/ - uses the Internet to link data on 40 million fish specimens housed in 21 museums nationwide. Other KU Fishnet team members are C. Richard Robins, curator emeritus of fishes; David Vieglais, a research scientist, and A. Townsend Peterson, curator of birds and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Vieglais developed the information technology that put museum collection information on animals and plants on the Internet for both researchers and the public.
Daphne Fautin, curator of invertebrates and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of entomology, received a $500,000 award for her project to expand a database on marine corals and anemones. Robert Buddemeier, senior scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey, is a collaborator on the project.
"A quarter of the grants for the Census of Marine Life were awarded to KU, which is the finest peer acknowledgement of the strength of KU's biodiversity research enterprise," Krishtalka said. "With this new funding, NOPP, the Sloan Foundation, the NSF, and the Office of Naval Research confirm that the KU museum and research center leads the nation in biodiversity informatics research."
Biodiversity informatics is a new research area that uses the tools of information science to study biological diversity. It taps into knowledge represented by 3 billion specimens of plants and animals housed in museums worldwide. The Fishnet project will take advantage of the ichthyological community's leadership in capturing and sharing specimen information in electronic databases.
"Fishnet is a cooperative community network that will integrate databases on the Internet from Sidney, Australia, to Paris," Wiley said. "Every major collection of fishes in North America is a partner in the project, which will provide ichthyologists with information on the distribution of fishes worldwide while preserving each institution's control of its data. I am excited about the scientific potential of Fishnet and hope to see it grow beyond the institutions now participating."
Fautin's database project will greatly increase knowledge about the global distribution of marine invertebrates and help make predictions about the effect of environmental change on the distribution and survival of threatened species. The marine corals and anemones database - available on the Web at biocomplexity.nhm.ku.edu/anemones/images/version.html - includes information about where coral and anemone specimens have been collected and links to scientific papers describing each species.
"Much of our knowledge of the earth's biodiversity lies in the 3 billion specimens of animals and plants housed in museums worldwide, the result of 250 years of the biological exploration of the earth," Krishtalka said. "Museums are libraries of life, and by accessing the knowledge in those libraries, these two projects will advance our understanding of natural environments, improve our predictions about environmental phenomena, and inform the wise management of earth's natural resources for the benefit of society."