Lifemapper is a distributed collaborative effort to map the habitat ranges of various plants and animals, a sort of SETI@Home for endangered species:
"By using Lifemapper as your computer's screen saver, you will help discover knowledge of the life of the planet for the benefit of the Earth, its inhabitants and its environments.
"While running as your screen saver, Lifemapper will compute, map and provide knowledge of
*where Earth's species of plants and animals live
*where Earth's species of plants and animals could potentially live
*where and how Earth's species of plants and animals could spread across different regions of the world
"Together, you and other Lifemappers will assemble a powerful, predictive electronic atlas of Earth's biological diversity.
"It uses the Internet and leading-edge information technology to retrieve records of millions of plants and animals in the world's natural history museums. Lifemapper analyzes the data, computes the ecological profile of each species, maps where the species has been found and predicts where each species could potentially live."
(thanks, Howard!)
