ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology is collaborating with 16 other research institutions, including the Michigan State University Museum, on an innovative project that will allow simultaneous electronic access to members’ mammal collection databases.

The network, called MaNIS (Mammal Networked Information System), is the subject of a news article in the July 31 issue of the journal Nature.

MaNIS is expected to enhance conservation and research initiatives, both locally and globally. With two-thirds of the collections already online and the others preparing to participate, this store of irreplaceable data ultimately will provide researchers, public health officials and the general public with access to information on millions of natural history specimens with the click of a mouse button. Easy access to such data is crucial for:

· Identifying conservation hotspots. Researchers need accurate information about species distributions to identify locations that are biologically sensitive.

· Monitoring ecosystem change. With access to data on species distributions that span more than a century, scientists can isolate historic shifts in the distribution of mammal populations and document the impact of changing habitats or climate.

· Tracking emerging diseases. Many newly recognized disease-causing organisms, such as Hantaviruses, have mammals as hosts. By better understanding the biology of these mammals, scientists can better understand the biology of these diseases, the methods of transmission, the effectiveness of treatments and the diseases’ effects on human health and welfare.

· Monitoring invasive species. Knowledge of past and current species distribution patterns helps scientists and resource managers better understand, monitor and contain the spread of destructive and costly invasive species.

· Biodiversity and evolutionary studies. Identifying new species and understanding the patterns of evolutionary relationships among species requires access to large numbers of specimens that represent tangible evidence of diversity and evolutionary change.

Links to data portals to the network, along with a list of all 17 participating museums, can be found on the MaNIS Website at http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/manis/.

The project represents the leading edge of a new trend among natural history museums to increase the value of their collections by making them more accessible. Before the MaNIS network was developed, collection data from member institutions was trapped in hand-written ledgers or stand-alone databases inaccessible via the Web. Now scholars can quickly access information online that formerly required weeks, months, or years and many staff hours of effort to collate.

Distributed network access to natural history specimen data is not new. Early examples are The Species Analyst (http://speciesanalyst.net) and REMIB (www.conabio.gob.mx/remib_ingles/doctos/remib_ing.html). MaNIS, however, is the first implementation of a distributed database using Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR, http://digir.net), a collaborative, open-source development effort that provides generalized building blocks for creating distributed database networks of any sort.

The development of MaNIS is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of Califiornia, Berkeley.

http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/manis/

http://speciesanalyst.net

www.conabio.gob.mx/remib_ingles/doctos/remib_ing.html

http://digir.net