Washington

Birds on the wire: an online resource will collate information on a range of species. Credit: A. LEEK

Snakes, lizards and bears all have comprehensive specimen databases — and now one is being set up for the bird family.

On 1 August, the National Science Foundation gave a consortium of North American museums a five-year, $1.5-million grant to build ORNIS — the Ornithological Information System. ORNIS will be a database that contains information on around 4 million bird specimens from 30 collections. Its creators say they will improve on other databases by writing software to automate tasks such as synchronizing and checking data.

Species databases use a method called georeferencing to allow researchers to compare the geographical origins of specimens across collections. In databases such as MaNIS, which is for mammals, scientists must assign each specimen's map coordinates by hand. But ORNIS, which is not related to the European system of the same name, will assign and update geographical information for each specimen automatically.

“We are using the same concept as the other databases, but making it a lot more efficient,” says A. Townsend Peterson, leader of the ORNIS project and curator of ornithology at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “Georeferencing is an enormous task,” he explains.

The ORNIS team will also write software to check for errors in the collections. For instance, one program will check for specimens that have been collected suspiciously far from other, similar ones, as such outliers might have been misidentified by their collectors.

Peterson says ORNIS will aid research in other fields by sharing its software. “Other networks can grab the tools we are going to develop and plug them right into their own systems,” he says.