of the Island's natural history ever.

Bermuda Natural History Museum curator Wolfgang Sterrer said the project would take at least five years.

But he added it would be a vital tool for understanding the ecology of Bermuda -- and helping to protect it in the future.

Dr. Sterrer said: "It's a project to get all the information together which has been accumulated about Bermuda's natural history, in the broadest sense.'' He added that no-one knew exactly how many species were living in Bermuda.

Dr. Sterrer said the Island had been well-documented over the years from the early explorers on.

But he added: "This knowledge is dispersed over maybe 3,000 publications, of which we have around 2,500 on record here.'' He said a comprehensive mapping of details on land- and water-based life, delineating which ones are original to Bermuda and which are imports, would go a long way towards building up a plan to protect the Island.

Dr. Sterrer said: "We are talking about a complete system. The biological system is extremely important for the whole well-being of everything, including humans.

"A healthy and working ecological system is made up of all the species of plants and animals which interact.

"It's all a big recycling system -- a coral reef, every creature has a role to play, some less, some more. You can't really take a species out and expect the system to keep working.'' Dr. Sterrer added more and more drugs to battle killers like AIDS and cancer were being discovered in little-known species like sponges off Bermuda.

He said: "There is still a vast potential out there. We really don't know what we are losing when we lose a single species.

"Maybe we are losing some, maybe new ones are arriving -- we need a good database and that is what the Bermuda Biodiversity Survey is all about.

"And once we have that, we can see what changes have taken place in the past and whether they were natural or caused by man,'' he said. "We can also use it for planning and for estimating the impact future human activity may have on these systems.'' Preliminary work on creating the computer database of life on Bermuda has already begun, with the project expected to get up full steam early in the New Year.