Increased Functionality and Accessibility of the ETE Database

陆地生态系统演化计算机化数据库旨在对陆地生态系统及其动植物群落的古生物学和古生态学进行大范围的比较。本项目的研究兴趣主要集中在古群落结构、古植被和古环境的逐地详细比较，以及在整个地质时期追踪陆地生态系统生物结构变化的模式。这样的研究需要综合大量的信息，这些信息目前分散在大量的文献中，或者在博物馆收藏中未发表，而且很难利用古生物学中现有的信息资源来进行。目前的合同将支持购买新硬件和修改现有软件。具体目标是将项目迁移到运行在现代高性能工作站上的更标准的UNIX版本，并重新编写图形用户界面以与X Windows标准兼容。这将立即提高数据库目前正在编译和使用的站点（史密森尼和UCSB）的性能和功能。它还允许多种远程计算机上的多个用户访问数据库。

The Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems computerized Database is designed to allow broad-scale comparisons of the paleobiology and paleoecology of terrestrial ecosystems and their plant and animal communities. In particular, research interest in this project focuses on making detailed comparisons on a locality-by-locality basis of paleocommunity structure, paleovegetation, and paleoenvironments, and on tracing patterns in biological structural change in terrestrial ecosystems throughout geologic time. Such studies require the synthesis of large amounts of information currently scattered throughout a vast literature or lying unpublished in museum collections, and are difficult to undertake using the available information resources within paleontology. The current award will support the purchase of new hardware and modifications in existing software. The specific goal is to migrate the project to a more standard version of UNIX running on a modern, high-performance workstation and to re-write the Graphical User Interface to be compatible with X Windows standards. This will immediately allow increased performance and functionality at sites were the database is currently being compiled and used (the Smithsonian and UCSB). It will also allow access to the database by multiple users on a wide variety of remote computers.