Eco-Systems Biology

Biodiversity literature and data constitute a vast public resource open to mining and knowledge extraction. Associating organisms to key features of their life e.g. the environment in which they live, the way they feed, their breeding habits, is cornerstone in explaining biodiversity patters and informing ecological decisions. Eco-Systems Biology, and in particular network-based analysis, can provide holistic pictures of such associations, highlight novel relations and support hypothesis formulation and knowledge discovery. Initial aim of this vLab is to augment species related information based on data available in global biodiversity knowledge and literature aggregators, such as the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Main focus of this virtual lab is the extraction of species - traits associations starting with the environment in which occur. Species and environments associations will be extracted by mining relevant text field clauses of: a) in-house LifewatchGreece data, b) the EOL and the BHL text collection. Also, interactive web-based visualizations will be developed to summarise the extracted species - environments association and support data exploration and landscape ecology studies.