UC Berkeley spearheads effort to storage 84.3 million vertebrate records in the cloud
The University of California at Berkeley is spearheading a major effort called VertNet to store and make publicly accessible via the cloud some 84.3 million records on vertebrates from around the world.
According to a write-up of the project at UC Berkeley’s website, such a database of records would have been useful in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill as scientists raced to gauge the impact on local animal species.
For starters, VertNet includes vertebrate records from the Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History, National Museum of Natural History in Paris, UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and by the time the 3-year, $2.4 million project is done, some 130 institutions worldwide could be participating. VertNet merges existing database networks dubbed MaNIS for mammals, ORNIS for birds, HerpNET for reptiles and amphibians; and FishNet in an effort to ensure they can handle increased information requests going forward.
