About JRS
History
The J.R.S. Biodiversity Foundation was created in January 2004 when the nonprofit publishing company, BIOSIS was sold to Thomson Scientific. The proceeds from that sale were applied to fund an endowment and create a new grant-making foundation.
Our Name
The Board of Directors selected as the organization’s new name the: J.R.S. Biodiversity Foundation. This reflects both the historic legacy of the Foundation and its future grant-making domain. The initials J.R.S. stand for the name of one of the founders of BIOSIS. Biodiversity indicates the new funding interests that the Foundation chose for itself.
Mission
The Foundation defined a mission within the field of biodiversity:
To enhance knowledge and promote the understanding of biological diversity for the benefit and sustainability of life on earth.
Scope
To further advance the Foundation’s mission a scope was developed as:
Interdisciplinary activities primarily carried out via collaborations in developing countries and economies in transition. The Foundation Board of Trustees has expressed a particular interest in focusing its grant-making in Africa.
Strategic Interest
Within those bounds a considered course has been chosen to:
Advance projects, or parts of biodiversity projects that focus on: (1) collecting data, (2) aggregating, synthesizing, publishing data, and making it more widely available to potential end users, and (3) interpreting and gaining insight from data to inform policy-makers.
When the Foundation refers to biodiversity it does so within the context of the meaning set by The Convention on Biological Diversity where at the Rio de Janeiro Conference in June 1992 it defined biological diversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, among other things, terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part: this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.”
When the Foundation refers to biodiversity informatics it does so based on a definition taken in essence from Dr. Walter Berendsohn.
Biodiversity informatics is the application of information technology (IT) tools and approaches to biodiversity information, principally at the organismic level. It thus deals with information capture, storage provision, retrieval, and analysis, focused on individual organisms, populations, and species, and their interactions. It covers information generated by the fields of systematics, evolutionary biology, population biology, and ecology, as well as more applied fields such as conservation biology and ecological management.
The JRS Biodiversity Foundation is motivated to help protect the earth’s diverse species to improve the quality of life, better manage natural systems, sustain human health, and maintain economic stability.
The earth's species are declining at an alarming rate. Industrial development and population growth are leading to an unacceptable extinction rate among species. Although there is growing concern for the problem, a lack of appreciation for the value of biological diversity is still a barrier to addressing its loss.
Approximately 1.8 million species have been identified over the past 300 years. However, it is estimated that there are well over 20 million species yet to be identified. The knowledge about the species that have been named and the value of our planet's biodiversity rests in the hands of relatively few experts, many from industrialized countries. This knowledge often tends to be inaccessible to local communities, conservation practitioners, policy makers, and the general public. The Foundation hopes, through the projects it funds to make biodiversity information more widely available to users of scientific data, policy makers, and the public.
An important way to make biodiversity information more widely available is through the support of biodiversity science. Biodiversity science is interdisciplinary in its nature, and as it becomes increasingly data-driven it requires collaboration between environmental biologists, computer scientists, and network engineers from around the planet. The field of biodiversity informatics is a multi-contributor process beginning with methods and activities associated with data collection and data management, and ending in the application of derived knowledge for science and society. This includes technology approaches to collecting and interpreting biological information, as well as mechanisms to improve communication, and the skills to use data and tools between disciplines. Therefore, the aim of the JRS Biodiversity Foundation is to support interdisciplinary activities in biodiversity-informatics training and development, primarily executed via collaborations. |
