Informatics is a multi-disciplinary biology and software engineering unit of the Biodiversity Institute. Unlike academic departments and the collection divisions within the Institute, our exclusive focus is on the design, delivery, and support of hardware and software solutions for biological collections research. Our integrative science "cyberinfrastructure" products include desktop workstation applications, network protocols, computational and analytical web services, as well as technical support.

Department members include biologists and professional software developers with competencies in user interface design, object-oriented software engineering, geospatial data processing, cluster computing, geospatial visualization, science workflow management tools, database programming, and geospatial web services. 

The Specify and Lifemapper Projects anchor our research informatics activities. They each have several satellite projects, and both contribute significantly to the global cyberinfrastructure for biodiversity research.