CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
CU researchers plotting the "Map of Life
May 22nd
Effort could be a key to preserving rare species
A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its “Map of Life,” an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
The demonstration version allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and North American freshwater fish. The database, which continues to expand, already contains hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of the planet’s diverse flora and fauna.
“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Guralnick of the ecology and evolutionary biology department, part of the Map of Life research team. “Such information could be used by any organization that needs to make informed decisions regarding land management, health, conservation and climate change.”
The initial version of the map tool being released today is intended to introduce it to the broader public, according to the researchers. It allows users to see several levels of detail for a given species — at its broadest, the type of environment it lives in, and at its finest, specific locations where the species’ presence has been documented. One function allows users to click a point on the map and generate a list of vertebrate species in the surrounding area. More functions will be added over time, according to the team.
The bryozoa fish are found in the Connecticut River
“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and the project lead. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”
A paper by Jetz, Guralnick and Jana McPherson of the Calgary Zoological Society describing the evolving Map of Life technology tool appeared in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
By highlighting the known abundance and distribution of species, the researchers hope to identify and fill knowledge gaps and also offer a tool for detecting change over time. They expect the map tool will prove useful for professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, conservation organizations and the general public.
The team is using information gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involved scientists, conservation organizations and “citizen scientists.” The project’s success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs, and subsequent versions of the mapping tool will offer mechanisms for users to supply new or missing information about the distribution and abundance of particular species.
Snow Leopards of Tibet are nearly extinct
Jetz called the Map of Life “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.” The team continues to work on several other tasks and challenges, including who will be contributing data and how information supplied by the contributors will be verified and curated.
“A small but powerful next step is to provide a means for anyone, anywhere on the globe to use their mobile devices to instantly pull up animal and plant distributions and even get a realistic assessment on the odds of encountering a particular species of wildlife,” said Guralnick, who also is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Guralnick said the Map of Life project is following in the footsteps of other knowledge repositories like the GenBank project, a National Institutes of Health-funded effort with a public database of more than 135 million gene sequences from more than 300,000 organisms that allows users to explore genes and genomes using bioinformatics tools. In the biodiversity arena, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Copenhagen has developed an important resource that provides access to more than 300 million records of plant and animal occurrences, which is one of the distributional databases being used by the Map of Life team.
The National Science Foundation has provided initial support for the Map of Life project. Other supporters are the Encyclopedia of Life; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, both in Germany.
The public demonstration version of Map of Life can be found at http://www.mappinglife.org/ and more information about the project is available at http://www.mappinglife.org/about.
Boulder water festival for students to be held on Wednesday
May 14th
20th annual Boulder Water Festival teaches students how to conserve and protect water
More than 1,100 4th and 5th grade students from 45 classrooms in 17 Boulder area schools will participate in the 20th annual Boulder Water Festival from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesday, May 16, at the University Memorial Center (UMC) on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus, 1669 Euclid Ave.
The nationally recognized water festival engages local students in hands-on activities about where Boulder’s drinking water comes from and how to protect and conserve this valuable natural resource. Students attend a series of classes to discover the geography, history, and science of water; explore the Boulder Creek watershed and its geology; and study the animals and plants that rely on water for survival.
Participating classes also complete the “Operation: Water Festival” program, a standards-based series of pre-festival classroom learning activities. The program provides a complete teacher’s packet featuring lesson guides, student worksheets and trivia questions for each water topic. Topics include fundamental water awareness, conservation, pollution prevention and flooding. Student “Water Agents” receive a certificate upon completion of the classroom activities.
A key benefit of the “Operation: Water Festival” materials is a take-home book for families. The book encourages students to work with family members to complete activities related to local water resources, conservation and protection.
“Students really have a complete learning experience,” said Samantha Messier, science director for the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD). “This provides a great learning tool to help students learn about one of our most important natural resources in Colorado.”
The Boulder Water Festival will commemorate its 20th anniversary as part of the statewide celebration of 2012, The Year of Water in Colorado. Nearly 19,000 BVSD and Boulder area students have participated in the festival since its inception in 1992.
Festival sponsors include the City of Boulder, the Keep it Clean Partnership, Northern Water, the UMC, CU Boulder’s Office of Community Relations and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
For more information, contact Curry Rosato, City of Boulder watershed outreach coordinator, at 303-829-9316.
Conference on World Affairs online problems : Twitter let down Grays attend
Apr 9th
A search for Conference on world Affairs lands lookers on dead link for most of the day. The schedule was not there and was only recently put up. That foul-up had to render the first day useless.
The first day of the conference was nearly void of CU students once again. Most of the attendees were grays in their 40s, 50s and 
60s. This again brings into question: is the conference relevant?
The All a Twitter panel discussion in the UMC was attended not by Boulders Twitter SM startup crowd but by mostly older people who were not exactly tweeps. This session was not what one would have expected. It was not start-up Boulder week, not Ignite Boulder and it wasn’t Twitter.
The panelists were an interesting mix too: Mark Frauenfelder Ross Haenfler Andy Ihnatko Sanho Tree . Sociology professor Ross Haenfler said he stopped tweeting and compared it to drug addiction and himself to a recovering addict. He then went on to say that most people on twitter waste enormous amounts of their life on social media. Not a glowing endorsement of TWitter or SM.
Boing Boing founder and Boulderite Ross Haenfler was certainly the biggest web superstar to attend the panel. Though Boing Boing significance and contribution was lost on the audience, it was also lost on the conference. He seemed concerned about the significance of multiple uses of tweets.
Andy Ihnako Chicago Sun times Geek reporter also talked about how twitter wraps around your mind and has the potential to enslave.
Sanho Tree is a leftist Fellow and social activist. He talked about social activism on Twitter.
The tone of this session was politically leftist with continuous barbs thrown at conservatives who use twitter. So much for CU chancellors new policy of fair and balanced. All of the panelists criticized main stream media for not covering the news. None of them could explain the business side of Twitter. They also seemed oblivious to the fact that Television and News papers lost their foothold to online advertisers such as Google and Facebook
The one saving grace of this panel was to point out just what a waste of a persons life Twitter can be. They couldn’t stress how addictive Twitter and Facebook are and impossible to manage. This was a surprise, but not to the gray attendees. Seemed they seen it all before in a younger life. And the young? They were nowhere to be seen. One would have thought the room would have been packed with 18 to 34 year olds. Maybe they were studying or at work. Maybe this panel should have been held at night in a bar or coffee house.
