A Tropical Marine Microbial Natural Products Geobibliography as an Example of Desktop Exploration of Current Research Using Web Visualisation Tools

Microbial marine biodiscovery is a recent scientific endeavour developing at a time when information and other technologies are also undergoing great technical strides. Global visualisation of datasets is now becoming available to the world through powerful and readily available software such as Worldwind, ArcGIS Explorer and Google Earth. Overlaying custom information upon these tools is within the hands of every scientist and more and more scientific organisations are making data available that can also be integrated into these global visualisation tools. The integrated global view that these tools enable provides a powerful desktop exploration tool. Here we demonstrate the value of this approach to marine microbial biodiscovery by developing a geobibliography that incorporates citations on tropical and near-tropical marine microbial natural products research with Google Earth and additional ancillary global data sets. The tools and software used are all readily available and the reader is able to use and install the material described in this article.