As its first step towards biodiversity informatics, the biodiversity e-science cloud platform plan of Chenshan Botanical Garden will launch in 2014.

Biodiversity informatics is based on three fundamental levels: the diversity of species, inheritance and the ecosystem. As a newly-emerging interdisciplinary field, it has become a new major direction of research and subject construction in biology. It serves as a significant boost to the development of biology.

The biodiversity e-science cloud platform of Chenshan Botanical Garden will rely on public cloud facilities in Shanghai and research cloud platforms of the Chinese Academy of Science. It seeks to achieve freer Internet data flow through search engines and to help users manage, edit and post data resources.

Presently the preparatory work, including requirement research and informatization scheme design, are under way. Preliminary technology selection and testing has also been conducted.

By Guo Chang

Edited by Michael Thai, Huang Pei