Robert Guralnick, an informatics associate curator with the Florida Museum of Natural History, discusses the Map of Life, a powerful, interactive mobile app that helps users determine what species of animals and organisms are nearby anywhere in the world. He explains the app’s vital role for continued biodiversity research as well as citizen science initiatives.
Interview and videos produced by Kaitlyn Maxian for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Robert Guralnick: Map of Life is a project that we started back in 2008 and it has a really simple idea behind it. The idea of Map of Life was that we know our knowledge about where species are found on the planet, but what we know about species distributions is extremely limited. One of the premier things about Map of Life is that it has a research function on the one hand, so we want to provide research products to support endeavors that are for scientists and for land managers and for governments, but we really are seriously taking the the goal of getting biodiversity knowledge and citizen science into the hands of the citizens.
We produce web apps, especially mobile apps that give everybody access to all of this knowledge. One of the things I love most about this project is we’re helping to make knowledge that’s always been there easier to access and discover and to learn from. That really stems from very simple tools where you can, you know, download the Map of Life mobile app for your iPhone or for your Android device and with a click of a button where you’re standing you can find out a whole bunch of knowledge about the species that are within range of where you’re standing.
You can get a list of taxa for many, many, many groups of organisms and with that you can learn about those organisms and also make your own reports of what you’ve seen so that you can help contribute to knowledge, so the knowledge flow goes in both directions. So you get some really cool knowledge and information that you can use, and we hopefully incentivize you and motivate you to become a contributor as well, so that you can report what you’re seeing and let us know what you know and that’s powerful.
Learn more about the Map of Life.