Natural History Museum gets grant

The Tulane University Museum of Natural History recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation for almost $1.2 million.

The money will pay for the redesign of a computer program developed by one of its staff members that helps researchers organize and locate natural history collections worldwide.

Public Relations Director Mike Strecker said that the grant was announced early last month.

Nelson Rios is the Manager of Collections and Informatics at the Museum of Natural History. He developed the computer program GEOLocate in 2003. Beginning in 2000, the museum completely databased and georeferenced the Museum of Natural History fish collection, which has more than 7 million species.

“The georeferencing was done largely by hand,” Rios said. “It provided an excellent opportunity to test various automated alternatives to georeferencing.”

The National Science Foundation awarded the museum its first grant in 2002 to develop GEOLocate.

“Since then, we have expanded GEOLocate with global geographic coverages, multi-lingual textual analysis and collaborative, community based georeferencing,” Rios said.

Hank Bart has served as the Director of the Museum since 1993.

“GEOLocate is useful for collections that were compiled a long time ago, before the invention of GPS, which is [how] most of the data stored in natural history museums [was compiled],” Bart said.

The program was developed to assist researchers from around the world. Hundreds of researchers and institutions worldwide are currently using the program, which is helping them catalog natural history collections.

GEOLocate aids other researchers and institutions by assigning latitude and longitude to data. It is estimated that there are nearly 3 million specimens in natural history museums throughout the world, the majority of which lack geographic coordinates.

“It is similar to how Google Maps helps you find your house or the nearest Starbucks, but instead of deciphering addresses we are looking at specimen locality descriptions,” Rios said.

The newly received grant money will be used to help redesign the program so that it can better aid researchers.

“The current software is a standalone desktop application with about two gigabytes of data, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to update and expand this dataset with the current architecture,” Rios said.

Rios said that the redesigned program will allow researchers to utilize new data sources and maps, improve upon the core georeferencing algorithms and integrate directly with collection databases and other software applications.

The National Science Foundation awarded the Museum of Natural History its first grant in 2002 to develop GEOLocate. This is the fifth and biggest grant that the Tulane Museum of Natural History has received.

The Museum of Natural History is located in Belle Chasse, La. and is administered through a department in the Tulane School of Science and Engineering.

The $12 million grant marks the fifth and largest the museum has ever received. Tulane’s Natural History Museum, located near Belle Chasse, houses exhibits featuring fish, birds, reptiles, invertebrates, mammals and paleoiths.