The e-Biosphere 09 International Conference on Biodiversity Informatics will bring together an exceptional array of speakers and participants to highlight the achievements in Biodiversity Informatics today and to discuss strategies for its future. This conference presents a unique opportunity for a wide range of professionals, researchers, and students to come together to help plan the future of the field. What is Biodiversity Informatics? Biodiversity Informatics is a young and rapidly growing field that brings information science and technologies to bear on the data and information generated by the study of organisms, their genes, and their interactions. In doing so, it is creating unprecedented global access to information on biological species and their role in nature. Online Conference Community The organizers of the e-Biosphere 09 International Conference on Biodiversity Informatics have created a series of electronic discussion forums under the umbrella of the “Online Conference Community” (OCC). The OCC offers researchers and users of Biodiversity Informatics the opportunity to interact and prepare for the conference which will take place in London on 1-3 June 2009. The OCC has been divided into subcommunity discussion forums that focus on Biodiversity Informatics from a variety of perspectives—different users of biodiversity data, or data providers, or research priorities. Session 8 of the conference will be devoted to breakout discussion groups that correspond to the ten most active OCC subcommunities. This will enable participants in the OCC discussions to meet in person to continue their work and finalize their recommendations to the conference. Each discussion group will be asked to prepare a Position Paper describing the directions in which Biodiversity Informatics needs to develop in the next 5-10 years. The leaders of each discussion group will be invited to submit the Position Paper and accompanying manuscripts for possible publication in the Conference Proceedings volume. The following pre-constructed communities have been created to launch online discussions, but participants in the online environment will be able to merge, split and form new communities. A current landscape and future roadmap for Biodiversity Informatics Standards development and management Global Names Architecture Cybertaxonomy Basic biodiversity science research Training in biodiversity informatics Developing world Sustainable economic development Ecology and ecosystems, environmental sustainability, climate change Conservation and land use Agriculture Forestry Fisheries Public Health Uses in public, K-12 and higher education Citizen science Please begin by registering for OCC. Though anyone may visit the forums on a read-only basis, registration will be required before you can participate and post messages to a forum within a community. The Conference organizers will provide an interim moderator for the discussion forum, but you are welcome to volunteer to moderate the forum. Please write to David Schindel at SchindelD@si.edu if you are interested in moderating the forum.