ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of some current and potential applications of GeoComputation (GC) in biology. GC and biology overlap in several important areas in terms of algorithms and application spaces, but there is considerable potential for further use of biological applications in GC research. Biological data, with its taxonomies, phylogenies, genetic relatedness and molecular data, do not always lend themselves to analysis using conventional GC data structures. This means that standard GC approaches often need to be adapted or rebuilt when used for biological applications. Following a discussion of pertinent data structures and the explosive growth in acquired and warehoused biological data now available for numerical investigation, a set of example application areas of relevance to, or representing opportunity for, GC research are considered. The topics covered in this chapter demonstrate how biological applications espouse the core organising concepts and techniques of GC and that computationally intensive modelling of biological systems is very much at the cutting edge of biology research. Much biologically oriented GC research has already begun, but there remains a wealth of opportunity for researchers in GC to utilise and explore biological data and applications.
