This is an archived article. For the latest news, go to the Advance Homepage . Robert K. Colwell was planning a project in the forests of Costa Rica when he realized how cumbersome and time consuming it would be to keep track manually of the tens of thousands of specimens he and his colleagues would soon discover. Colwell and biologists from 12 universities are racing against time to find and catalogue the rain forest's incredible insect diversity before deforestation destroys these species.
Efficiency is at a premium.
We need better ways to use human resources more efficiently,'' he says. First published in December 1996 by Sinauer Associates, the nation's leading publisher in ecology and evolutionary biology, the software now holds information on the ecology of 23 countries on six continents. For his efforts, Colwell has been selected one of the first six recipients of the Chancellor's Information Technology Awards. Colwell's work has received particular attention because La Selva, or ''The Forest,'' the field station in Costa Rica where he decided to create his software, is one of the most studied areas in the world. UConn was a charter member of the consortium that operates La Selva, joining in 1963.