Biodiversity and biocomplexity informatics: Policy and implementation science versus citizen science

Biological science is one of the top ten social trends and the twenty-first Century has been defined as "The Age of Biology". One of the central themes of this age is biodiversity. Biodiversity is the richness of life. Biodiversity includes the variety of genes within one species through the complex interconnection of all life within an environment. One of the grand challenges of the twenty-first century is to document and understand the world's natural heritage. The management of the many kinds of information associated with this endeavor is "Biodiversity Informatics". There are many efforts developing worldwide to collect and distribute this information in digital collections. Some of these efforts are complementary; some efforts are in conflict and are just independent. There is a great need to integrate this information to increase its usefulness and value. Unfortunately, this integration is extremely difficult because of the diversity of the use and users of the information and the diversity of the information itself. The panelists will discuss different perspectives on the construction of global biodiversity digital libraries from the perspective of different goals and uses.