At the Natural History Museum in London, botanists, entomologists and zoologists are developing a computer system which may play a crucial role in helping to conserve the planet's endangered animals and plants.
The system, called World Map, can give planners of national parks and areas of conservation a more efficient way of identifying the sites they need to protect to save the maximum number of animals and plant species in a given part of the globe.
The program, an example of an expert system, will analyse knowledge on the numbers, distribution and types of species in an area which has been gathered over many years from scientific field trips.
Dr Chris Humphries, a senior scientist on the museum team, says: "It will then optimise the possibility of getting maximum biodiversity in the minimum number of areas." The museum's team has just completed a project looking at antelopes in Africa for the species survival commission of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, based in Gland, Switzerland.
The IUCN furnished information including maps on the distribution and relationships of Africa's 78 antelope species and then the program was set to work. It identified between 40 and 50 key conservation sites, in order of importance, that would save the maximum number of antelope species. Some of the sites identified were already conservation areas. However, the program showed that they may be less important than other sites that are not protected.
World Map is also being deployed in Brazil where it is trying to identify, in order of priority, areas in the Amazon Basin containing the maximum number of species of economically important trees, including members of the coco plum and Brazil nut families.
Researchers at the Australian National Museum are harnessing the system to identify sites for lizards. In South Africa, at Cape Town University's Percy Fitzpatrick Institute, World Map is being used for game birds such as quails.
The system highlights how zoologists, botanists and botanical gardens around the world are starting to turn to information technology to improve their understanding of the world's flora and fauna.
Dr Nancy Morin, manager of the research data bases at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis and shortly to be its deputy director, says: "Botanical gardens have done their business in much the same way since the early 1600s. Computers are making the biggest change in the history of the discipline."
The Missouri Garden is a member of the Centre for Plant Conservation, a network of botanical gardens dedicated to managing populations of rare and endangered plant species in a garden setting. "Each has made the commitment to maintain viable populations from their areas. We use computers to keep in track of who has which populations and how they are doing," Dr Morin says.
Better management of collections is possible with modern information technology. Harvard University's Herbarium is, for example, bar-coding dried plant specimens rather like supermarkets code food. Herbaria are akin to lending libraries, with often many thousands of species being despatched and returned each year. The bar-coding system, which is being developed by Jim Beach, the data administrator, will help to keep track of specimens so that scientists know what is on loan and where, and what is in storage.
A bar coding system also allows a herbarium to rapidly alter cataloguing details if new research indicates that some plants should be renamed rather than having to amend, by hand, written records.
The Harvard Herbarium is also experimenting with geographic information systems and satellite imaging data to pinpoint the locations of plant species in Borneo. Such techniques may help to cut the costs of floral surveys by reducing the time and number of scientists needed in the field.
Where computers are expected to play an ever increasing role is in the challenge to classify, describe and name the between five and 30 million species alive on Earth. It is estimated that fewer than 1.6 million have been studied at even the most basic level.
Crucial to this process is access to details on collections held at the world's leading centres. This enables researchers to establish the extent of duplication and whether identical species have been catalogued under different names in different places. Meanwhile researchers in the field can quickly establish whether or not a "find" is indeed new.
One of the projects Dr Morin is involved in is in collecting and documenting the plants on lands from Mexico to the Colombian border. The Flora MesoAmericana project, launched in 1981, is being run in conjunction with Natural History Museum, in London, and the National Autonomous University in Mexico. According to Dr Sandy Knapp of the London museum, the project is helping to fill "a vacuum of knowledge about what is out there both on the ground and in museums".
The Flora MesoAmericana project's first volume is to be published in April 1993 in book form. The information is also being loaded onto Missouri's Tropicos data base. By accessing the Joint Academic Network (JANET) in Britain, botanists will soon be able to have access to the St Louis database via America's Internet network. Such access could allow researchers in London, for example, to identify more rapidly a newly collected species from Central America as a relative of an economically important one previously believed to be alien to the region.
Over the coming years it is likely that computers will increase the rate at which different biological disciplines merge together in the race to conserve biodiversity.
By analysing knowledge on a plant with information on climatic conditions, geography, soil chemistry, and, for example, distribution of predators, scientists may improve the success rate of reintroductions of rare species.
Whether the full potential of global biological data bases can be realised will depend on the adoption of standards and issues of intellectual property rights. Charles Stirton, deputy director of Kew Gardens, which is reviewing its information technology strategy, says: "These are not trivial issues. Technically things may be more achievable than they are ethically."
