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进行广泛的比较。特别是，该项目的研究兴趣集中在逐个地点的古群落结构、古植被和古环境的基础上进行详细的比较，以及在整个地质时期跟踪陆地生态系统的生物结构变化的模式。这样的研究需要综合目前分散在大量文献中或在博物馆藏品中未出版的大量信息，而且很难利用古生物学中可用的信息资源进行。目前的奖励将支持购买新的硬件和对现有软件进行修改。具体目标是将该项目迁移到在现代高性能工作站上运行的更标准的Unix版本，并重写图形用户界面以与X Windows标准兼容。这将立即提高目前正在汇编和使用该数据库的站点(史密森学会和UCSB)的性能和功能。它还将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studies require the synthesis of large amounts of information currently scattered throughout a vast literature or lying unpublished in museum collections, and are difficult to undertake using the available information resources within paleontology.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.