Contemporary tools for identification, assessment and monitoring biodiversity

Biodiversity identification and monitoring have undergone a sea change over the past two hundred years. What started as documentation of natural diversity by naturalists such as Barton and Darwin has evolved into a highly sophisticated and organized exercise with potential uses in studies of global importance like climate change and ecosystem sustainability. Due to the localized and transect based studies, largely dependent on the accessibility of the area, there are gaps in biodiversity explorations. Absence of uniformity in documentation of biodiversity and insufficient tools to disseminate the observations have resulted in the exercise being frequently relegated to the compilation of project reports only. The recent advancement in the fields of Remote Sensing & Geographic Information System, mobile computing, GPS technology, wireless connectivity, and internet has enabled accurate and uniform documentation of biological diversity with revisit capability helping in identification of the hotspots of biodiversity and the gaps in biodiversity exploration. The unlimited connectivity through the World Wide Web has also ensured proper dissemination of biodiversity data and reduced the redundancy in data generation.