Microsoft has been named the first official corporate partner of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which is considered among conservation scientists to be the most authoritative list of the viability of plant and animal species around the globe. The IUCN asked Microsoft to join during the organization’s quadrennial conference in Jeju, Korea this week.
Microsoft announced the news late Monday in a release on its Microsoft Research website:
Microsoft’s contribution, funded by Microsoft Research Connections, includes a variety of factors, including [Microsoft scientist Lucas] Joppa’s participation, that of a contractor, free licensing of application technology, access to the FetchClimate web service, and, possibly, Windows Azure software and communications assistance for web services and outreach.
The most significant portion of Microsoft’s contribution, though, is the development of software, built on SQL Server 2012 and using Bing Maps, that helps the IUCN map threats to species.
“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”
The news is also a PR boost for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is still struggling to win users back from Google, which also attempted to promote its own conservation mapping efforts at the IUCN World Conservation Congress.
Separately, Microsoft recently launched a new “Pepsi challenge-style” ad campaign promoting Bing over Google.
