Altitude referenced biological databases

GMBA (Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment) held a kick-off meeting on mountain biological data base mining in Kazbegi, Rep. of Georgia, in July 2006. It capitalized on the expertise from different fields of biology and data base experts. GMBA encourages a global effort to mine geo-referenced archive databases on mountain organisms, to build new biodiversity databases, and to link them with each other and with geophysical databases. Gradients of altitude and the associated climatic trends, topographic and soil peculiarities, fragmentation and connectivity among biota and their varied geological history are the major drives of mountain biodiversity.
Electronic archives provide avenues towards testing evolutionary and ecological theory across the world's mountain ranges. GMBA will follow up on this in a SCOPE Rapid Assessment synthesis Project. The task will be to get a synthesis of regional mountain biotic richness from various parts of the world.