Two prizes for the Biotik software

11/03/2010 - Snippets

At the end of 2009, the software for the identification of tree species in the forests of the western Ghats, India, was awarded first prize from the Bioinformatics Centre at Pondicherry University, as well as the 2009 Manthan Prize for South Asia.

The French Institute in Pondicherry (IFP) developed the software within the framework of the European Biotik project, coordinated by Pierre Grard, a CIRAD researcher with the Botany and Computational Plant Architecture Joint Research Unit (UMR AMAP). It is a multimedia system to help identify species, which provides a botanic and ecological description of the species in English and other local languages. The application is useful for researchers and students, as well as for foresters and parataxonomists as an aid to decision-making for forestry conservation and management.

The Manthan Prize is an Indian initiative to recompense the best innovations in terms of electronic content and creativity. The first prize from the Bioinformatics Centre at Pondicherry University (BICPU) was awarded at the conference on recent trends in the fields of structural bioinformatics and quantitative biology.