The Vermont Atlas of Life is a library of knowledge on Vermont’s animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms – an online, real-time resource with maps, photographs, and data open for anyone to use. VAL is a collaborative, digital and open infrastructure that collects and aggregates biodiversity data from multiple sources to make it accessible for conservation, research, monitoring, analysis, and education.
For more than two centuries, biologists, naturalists and citizens have documented and celebrated the animals, plants, and other life that together define the nature of this green state. Yet on this journey of discovery we have taken only the first few steps.
What lives here? Where is it? What’s common? What’s at risk? What will be? The answers lie scattered among books, reports, computers, museums, and even in the memories or journals of Vermonters now living or long passed. The average department store knows more about its inventory than we know about what lives in Vermont. In the information age, this is troubling.
As human activity profoundly alters the map of life on local and global scales, our response requires knowledge of plant and animal distributions across vast landscapes and over long periods of time. Vermonters cannot respond effectively to climate change, natural disasters, invasive species, and other environmental and economic threats without a new understanding of the state’s living resources. At stake is nothing less than the health of our natural world, economy, and human life itself.
The Vermont Center for Ecostudies’ solution is the Vermont Atlas of Life (VAL). VAL is a library of knowledge on the biodiversity of Vermont: animals, plants, and fungi. At VAL’s core are powerful computers holding and serving every bit of data the atlas project will accumulate. VAL is also a community of people contributing and using information about the changing nature of Vermont: distribution maps, photographs, and other data for anyone to use – from backyard naturalists to scientists to policy makers. In short, VAL is one of the most ambitious and far-reaching biodiversity projects Vermont has ever undertaken.
Vermonters have long upheld a tradition of documenting biodiversity. Biologists and citizen volunteers have recently completed major statewide atlases of birds, butterflies, reptiles, and amphibians. Yet these worthy efforts represent a mere fraction of the state’s natural heritage. We know of 382 bird species and 58 mammal species inhabiting Vermont; our insect diversity alone may approach 22,000 species. Although we have a common knowledge of Vermont’s critical food-crop pollinators, such as bees and other insects, there exists no reliable assessment of their distribution or population trends.
VAL is bridging critical gaps in the loose network of individuals, scientists, organizations, and governments collecting biodiversity knowledge here in Vermont and across the planet. Serving as a model for other states, VAL is linking Vermont to worldwide biodiversity projects.