The San Francisco-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced two grants totaling nearly $4 million to NatureServe in Arlington, Virginia, to support Latin American conservation and information technology initiatives.

Awarded through the foundation's Amazon-Andes Initiative, the largest of the two grants — $2.4 million over two years — will support NatureServe's work to produce maps and accompanying databases documenting ecological systems, endemic species, threats, and protected areas on the eastern slope of the Andes and the Amazonian lowlands of Peru and Bolivia. A second grant of $1.5 million will enable the organization to analyze how biodiversity software products currently meet the needs of key user communities and identify where unmet needs exist. By highlighting those gaps, the project hopes to identify ways to make biodiversity software more useful to users in the scientific, conservation, corporate, and government sectors.

"NatureServe and its partners are in the best position to compile and analyze significant amounts of biophysical data, deliver new findings on the distribution of species and ecosystems, and apply decision-support systems in tropical environments," said Jaime Cavelier, senior program officer for the Andes-Amazon Initiative. "These grants will allow NatureServe to complete these analyses and to make the results readily available to the scientific and conservation community."