Lifemapper is a digital library that serves species distribution data on a global scale. Using a distributed Internet query architecture to retrieve georeferences from biological specimen databases in museums worldwide, we create maps and predictive models of species ranges based on environmental correlations with locales where species are known to occur. To parallelize the computation of each independent species prediction we created a screen-saver client that performs predictive analyses on desktop computers before uploading the resulting model to the Lifemapper server. Lifemapper uses San DiegoSupercomputer Center's GARP algorithm, ESRI’s ArcIMS, ArcSDE and Microsoft’s SQL Server as its primary software components.
