Species Information System, Natural History Museum, London
The Species Information System project (SIS) was initiated in 2018 by the Natural History Museum, London, with the support of the A. G. Leventis Foundation. This ground-breaking application will enable scientists to search thousands of biodiversity documents and contemporary ecological data, gathering information on species that are at risk of extinction. Many crucial research documents are over 50 years old and poorly indexed, requiring laborious manual work to find, verify and extract relevant information. The SIS prototype uses novel techniques, such as natural language processing and data mining, to extract named entities (for example, traits and taxa) from research publications. Once fully developed, this tool will allow scientists, such as the museum’s Plants Under Pressure team – which aims to quantify how many plant species are threatened across the world – to increase the scope, accuracy and impact of global conservation work. It will enable conservationists to make rapid species assessments with the goal of guiding conservation efforts, informing international policy and dramatically improving our understanding of threatened flora around the world.
Grants given:
2018, 2019
