Together with ECP’s Robin Foster, William (Bil) Alverson is working to make digitized, color photos of tropical plants available in a free, searchable format on the Web (and eventually on convenient, hand-held instruments similar to Palm Pilots). He is involved in the vPlants project, which will make label data and images of over 100,000 herbarium specimens collected in the Chicago Wilderness region available on the Web. Also, Bil is part of a now 10-year-long study of the immediate and cumulative effects of white tailed deer on the regeneration of several important tree species in northern Wisconsin and Michigan.

Prior to joining ECP, Bil participated in the Plant Names Project at Harvard University, which merged data from the Index Kewensis, Gray Herbarium Index, and the Australian Plant Names Index into the International Plant Names Index (IPNI): a Web-accessible comprehensive source of ca. 1.4 million scientific names of vascular plants. Bil hopes to utilize technologies from these projects to build a portal, associated with IPNI, that would provide Web access at no charge to high quality photographs of vascular plant type specimens at major herbaria. Bil earned a B.S. in Botany from the University of Wisconsin in 1978 and went on to receive a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1986. He is the Executive Director of the Diversity Inventory Group (DIG), which is a small non-profit, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that gives grants and awards to individuals who are working creatively to inventory biological diversity in temperate and tropical habitats in the Americas.