After a day of scouting a conservation area in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 23 wildlife trackers put their Palm Pilots back in their cradles, sat down to dinner, and then gathered around a large LCD projector to see the results of their work. They'd registered thousands of signs of deer, coyotes, birds, and other animals. But what really yowled in the data that night was a mountain lion.

He kept leaving scat piles near packs of coyotes and raccoons. And because the trackers were so numerous and had picked up many clues, the pattern leapt out. The team deduced the mountain lion was communicating in an unexpected way, signaling his big-cat competitors to keep their paws off his prey.

"If I were out by myself, I'd never see that," says

Jon Young, a tracker and training consultant who led the expedition last month.

Such breakthrough moments are coming faster and faster as wildlife researchers drag increasingly sophisticated hardware and software into the field. Using handheld computers, digital cameras, and satellite positioning systems, scientists are able to simplify data collection, recruit more people to do the work, and take their most comprehensive look yet at plants and wildlife. If the high-tech push proves itself, it could do for biology something close to what carbon-dating has done for archaeology: give scientists a much more profound understanding of how nature interacts.

"If we could map 5,000 acres and the mountain lion data jumps out at us, imagine if we could simultaneously map the world," Mr. Young says. "I really believe in 10 years we'll look back at this as a major breakthrough towards understanding nature."

The new findings could reveal species that would improve food production and lead to new pharmaceuticals, give public-health experts advance warnings about the outbreak of pathogens, and offer scientists a much fuller picture of humanity's impact on the environment, researchers say.

"Only with such encyclopedic knowledge can ecology mature as a science and acquire predictive power," writes Edward O. Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and curator of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

The trouble is, ecologists have nowhere near the knowledge they need to build that encyclopedia. Strange as it may seem, most of the earth's species remain undiscovered. Biologists have catalogued between 1.5 million to 1.8 million species, but they suspect the earth contains at least double that number, according to Dr. Wilson, and nobody really knows how many there are. Some researchers estimate 10 million, but guesses range all the way up to 100 million. Just in fungi alone, biologists have distinguished only 69,000 of the up to 1.6 million they believe exist.

That is why Wilson has proposed an All-Species Initiative, an attempt to map 80 percent of earth's biodiversity within the next 25 years. It's an awesome task. It would require researchers to catalog several times as many species in the next quarter century as humanity has discovered since it started tromping the earth 2,500 centuries ago.

That's where the technology comes in. By bringing increasingly powerful software and hardware into the field, researchers can simplify the data-gathering and speed up its delivery and analysis. That's crucial in several ways.

For one thing, by making data-collection simple, more people can do the tracking without years of experience. "It's almost like having a more experienced tracker in your back pocket asking you questions," says Young, the leader of the Santa Cruz Mountain venture in California and CyberTracker trainer.

Loaded on a Palm Pilot or similar handheld computer, the software allows novice trackers to make observations. Then it takes them through a series of carefully designed questions to help ensure they don't miss something or wrongly catalog a sighting. And because the computer links to global positioning satellites, it automatically tabulates where the observations are made.

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