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Thornhill creates `clearinghouse' of environmental information
by Ben Gerdemann
Alan Thornhill, a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, maintains the Center for Conservation Biology Network Internet Web pages, which are a center for information about conservation biology. (The URL for the page is http://conbio.rice.edu .)

The CCBN has over 1,000 links to other Internet resources related to biodiversity, job listings from research positions to professorships and lists of degree programs and professors from other universities. It is host to several other Web pages, including the Society for Conservation Biology and The Orchid Weblopedia.

"I see the project as a clearinghouse for the academic and the semi-academic. It serves part of the function of a shelf in the library. We replace some of those shelves," Krist Bender, the Web master for the pages, said.

"We're trying to assist the Web browser to glean down the junk. If you search for `extinction' in AltaVista [a popular Internet search engine] you'll get hundreds of links, and most of them are related to the band," Thornill said.

All of the pages in the CCBN Virtual Library are checked for relevance and content before they are added.

Thornhill estimates that approximately 400 people visit his pages per day. According to Thornhill, everyone from professors to elementary school students come looking for information. "CCBN has become the hub for biology resources, and we're being sought out as a support for other projects. We're sitting in the center of a wheel as the hub with spokes pointing to everyone else."

CCBN has won several awards including recognition as one of the "Top 1,000" sites by a major computer magazine.

This item appeared in the News section of the February 28, 1997 issue.

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