Welcome to Lifemapper.
For more than 300 years, tens of thousands
of biologists around the world, through determined and rugged
exploration of the planet's wild places, have strived to discover
and document the diversity of life on earth. As a lasting legacy
of those epic surveys, biological museums have amassed
internationally-distributed collections of dried, mounted, pickled,
preserved, frozen and stuffed specimens which physically voucher
the natural distribution of wild species.
Today, with databases and Internet
communication protocols, biodiversity research collections have
assembled massive caches of information associated with these
voucher specimens--data describing what lived where and when.
Lifemapper starts there. It uses all of
the online geospatial species occurrence data to create
distribution maps and, notably, goes one step further to predict
where an individual species should exist based on where it is
documented to live. Lifemapper does this by combining species
occurrence data with global climate, terrain and land cover
information, to identify environmental correlates of species
ranges. This process is described in detail on the
Technology page.
Lifemapper's analysis and modeling tools
will address important environmental issues of our times, in
particular the potential impact of global climate change on the
distribution and sustainability of wild species, and they will
inform research priorities for future systematics, ecology and
conservation studies.
Please look over Lifemapper, watch for our
new web services and applications,
and let us know how Lifemapper might facilitate your research or
education objectives. We also have a short list of
Central Plains species.
Team Lifemapper