Editor's Summary For millennia, information about biological diversity has been collected as a way to understand the living world. The information record has evolved from early papyrus to modern electronic collections, but challenges to information access persist, despite and partly due to a variety of digital techniques and applications. Information exchange is hampered by lack of access to previous work, inconsistent naming, changes over time and insufficient resources to create comprehensive databases supporting federated search with Darwin Core metadata. With progress in biodiversity informatics, we will see greater use of DNA barcoding and metagenomic techniques to describe species, remote sensing tools and geographic information systems to detect and describe species' locations and movements and to identify habitats and environmental conditions. Biodiversity informatics provides essential scientific knowledge to better understand global ecosystems and to inform land use and policy decisions.
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P. Bryan Heidorn (2011) studied this question.