http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=4902
05 November 2002 08:21
BDT
Digital Noah's Ark for the world's lost
and endangered species to be set up in Britain
By Michael McCarthy,
Environment Correspondent
29 June 2000
www.arkive.co.uk
The 21st century version
of Noah's Ark, which will collect
pictures and sounds of all the threatened animals and plants
in the world and preserve them in one place for future
generations, was launched yesterday.
The enormous digital
database of electronic images and
sounds of every endangered species on the globe, from the
giant whale shark to the thumb-sized golden toad of
Costa Rica (which might already be extinct), is being
brought together in Britain. Appropriately, it is named Arkive.
Until Arkive, there
has been no central bank of the still
pictures, film images and sounds of the estimated 6,000
endangered animals and 30,000-plus endangered plants.
The recordings are scattered across the globe in television
company filing systems, picture libraries, private collections
and museum basements. They will now be freely accessible
on the website www.arkive.org.uk.
The Arkive project
is already receiving enthusiastic support
from many international companies and organisations with
large film, photograph and sound resources, such as Discovery
Channel, National Geographic, the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation and the BBC's Natural History Unit. They are
happy to co-operate because they see Arkive as a shop window
for their wares.
While Noah's gopher-wood
construction came to rest on top
of Mount Ararat, the new bits-and-bytes version of the ark
can be found somewhere less exotic but far more accessible
- the renovated harbourside at Bristol. It is an initiative
of the Wildscreen Trust, the Bristol-based educational charity
concerned with wildlife film and television.
Arkive was the brain
child of Christopher Parsons, one of
Britain's most eminent wildlife film-makers. He was the
executive producer of David Attenborough's ground-breaking
Life on Earth series for the BBC and later the head of the
corporation's natural history unit.
Mr Parsons, one of
the Wildscreen Trust's founders, first
suggested the giant database in the late Eighties but the
available computer technology was thought inadequate.
The increases in computing power of the past few years
mean the project can now go ahead.
Yesterday, the computer
company Hewlett Packard provided
the new ark's engine when it donated nearly £900,000 worth
of specialised hardware and software to accommodate the
database, including a custom-made core system, powerful
servers, associated networking and access to design and
development support.
"The sheer scale
of the project is breathtaking," said
David Dack, director of Hewlett Packard's Bristol laboratories.
"Full storage of the material will amount to several terabytes
- each one of which is more than 100 times the storage of the
average home computer."
Mr Parsons said: "Our
overall target is to have material on
all the endangered species of the world, except for micro-organisms.
We will take in all the insects, all the arthropods. In some cases,
it may only be one picture. And in some cases it may only be a
drawing."
He added: "Despite
conservation efforts, the future of so many
species is now in the balance so that it seems inevitable that
many will become extinct over the next few decades.
"Through Arkive,
we can bring together images and sounds of
the endangered ones to create an international audio-visual
library of scientific reference. For future generations,
it will also be a 'virtual museum' of the world's lost natural
treasures."
Arkive is also collecting
material on species that have already
become extinct this century. It has film, for example, of the
thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf or tiger, the marsupial predator
thought to have disappeared for good in the early Thirties,
although rumours persist that the animal may survive in
Tasmania's remoter areas.
It has pictures of
the quagga, the southern African relative
of the zebra, which died out in the early years of the last
century, and the film Mr Parsons' team took in the late
Seventies - for Life on Earth - of the Costa Rican golden
toad in its cloud forest home, where it has not been seen
since.
The initial plan for
the database was to hold 10 minutes of
moving images, six stills and two minutes of sound recording
of each species.
"But the wonderful
world of computer technology means
we now have the possibility of archiving several times
more than we envisaged," Mr Parsons said. "We're now
saying,
if we've got more, we should not restrict it. We might
make 10 minutes available for general access but at a deeper
level we can have much more material archived for future
generations.
"We will select
the most important material, but if you
take something like mountain gorillas, we know there is
probably 200 hours of film recorded, and all of it will
be on our computer."
Private collections
will be actively sought for the project.
"We would welcome a collection of photographs of endangered
orchids, or of weevils from, say, a member of a wildlife trust,"
Mr Parsons said.
To protect the commercial
interests of the suppliers, all
photographs will be watermarked with full copyright details
attached.
Arkive has lodged a
bid with the Heritage Lottery Fund for
money to create an ambitious "British chapter" of the
database,
which would hold images and sounds of all British wildlife
species - not just the endangered ones. If this is successful,
Mr Parsons hopes it might be imitated, resulting in similar
comprehensive chapters for other parts of the world, such
as a Middle East chapter or a Japanese chapter.
The whole project will
be housed at Wildscreen-at-Bristol,
the £25m millennium visitor and exhibition centre of the
Wildscreen Trust, which opens on 20 July. The centre houses
an Imax cinema in which Arkive's growing collection of the
world's best feature-length natural history films can be
viewed, and a suite of 30 computer stations at which the
database can be accessed.
"The world needs
this," Mr Parsons said. Old Man Noah
would doubtless have agreed.
