Heres some info copied from lifemapper.org
By using Lifemapper as your computer's screen saver, you will help discover knowledge of the life of the planet for the benefit of the Earth, its inhabitants and its environments.
While running as your screen saver, Lifemapper will compute, map and provide knowledge of
where Earth's species of plants and animals live
where Earth's species of plants and animals could potentially live
where and how Earth's species of plants and animals could spread across different regions of the world
Together, you and other Lifemappers will assemble a powerful, predictive electronic atlas of Earth's biological diversity.
How does Lifemapper do this?
It uses the Internet and leading-edge information technology to retrieve records of millions of plants and animals in the world's natural history museums. Lifemapper analyzes the data, computes the ecological profile of each species, maps where the species has been found and predicts where each species could potentially live.
The research that developed Lifemapper was supported by the National Science Foundation, the US government agency that supports all basic research and education in non-medical science.
How will Lifemapper's results be used?
For biodiversity research, education and conservation worldwide, especially to forecast environmental events and inform public policy with leading-edge science.
For example, using Lifemapper's predictions of animal and plant distributions
Researchers will be able to model and simulate the spread of emerging diseases, plant and animal pests, or invasive species of plants and animals and their effects on natural resources, agricultural crops and human populations.
Environmental scientists will be able to model and predict the effects of local, regional or global climate change on Earth's species of plants and animals.
Land planners and policy-makers will be able to identify the highest priority areas for biodiversity conservation.
Teachers, students and the public will be able to discover and map their backyard biodiversity and how it might be affected by changes in rainfall or temperature or by the spread of other species.
Humans have explored the life of the planet for the past 250 years. That knowledge is documented by millions of original specimens of plants and animals in the world's natural history museums and herbaria. Become a Lifemapper and help science use this knowledge to better understand and conserve Earth's biological diversity. Become a Lifemapper and help science inform environmental solutions for Earth's biological diversity
My personal take on lifemapper is that it is helping to combine plant and animal data from many different sources and analyzing them in a way that helps create a much more complete picture of where a specific species lives and where is could live. It helps unify the data that has been collected from many other institutions and as a user of the program you can have a preference of what type of data you want to crunch in terms of reptile, bird, fish, plant etc and also based on who collected the data - Field Museum, California Academy of Sciences, or one of hundreds of others from around the world.
The gui produces nice graphics showing what the program is doing. I think it is worth it to play around with it for awhile, but just for pure stats stick with the cli. You can always look up the last 500 species you analyzed. From here you can view maps of what you analyzed, information about the species and also google images of the species if it exists.