ZipcodeZoo.com aspires to be a useful Field Guide to plants and animals of the world. Often, to be useful, a field guide must have a sense of where you are and what might be found there. Our natural world is rapidly losing its diversity and abundance. To slow this loss, and to better appreciate the natural world, we must begin with local nature. ZipcodeZoo works to bring the natural world to armchair, amateur, and professional naturalists. Our focus is Applied Biogeography: understanding plants and animals in their place, perhaps even your backyard. We want to build an online field guide suited for the amateur naturalist. Here are highlights of what we have done so far: a) We've added information on 2,646,557 species from around the world. Zipcode Zoo is not just for Americans (and more than half our visitors don't live in the land of zipcodes.) b) We've been gathering field observations -- 127,715,643 so far -- and mapping them with the help of Google, to help you see exactly where a plant or animal has been reported. c) Finding just the right species in all of this can be like finding a needle in a haystack. A Proximity Lister and a Region Lister will help you find plants or animals in a geographic area of interest. PlantFinder offers 19 criteria to narrow your selection of plants. PlantFinder's database currently includes 1,555,827 attributes for 209,411 of the 1,105,429 plants on this site. BirdFinder uses location and 102,204 attributes for 4,753 birds. d) We've added popup definitions for 236,201 terms. For many terms such as "abdominal", the popup definition pronounces the term. Short definitions such as that for "entire" simply popup on mouse over, then go away. Other definitions, such as that for "abdominal" open in small windows. e) We've built localized lists of Invasives Near You and Threatened Near You to list local Invasives and threatened species. f) We've made a start at sorting through identifications with Key, a tool that helps you step through kingdom, phylum, class, order, and family to help you decide what species you have at hand. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
ZOBODAT (Zoological Botanical Database, formerly ZOODAT) is a digitally organised biogeographical database including analysis, documentation and communication facilities. Founded by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ernst Rudolf Reichl in 1972, ZOBODAT was taken over by the province of Upper Austria in 1999 and is located at the Biology Centre of the Upper Austrian Provincial Museums. The database contains data on the distribution of animal and plant species and diverse supporting digital libraries. Traditionally most of the data refers to insects and geographically to Austria. However, ZOBODAT can be used for all organism groups and worldwide. At this time some Biology Centre data records that already exist in digital form are not yet completely integrated into ZOBODAT. This applies to part of the entomology collection and part of the invertebrate collection not including insects. As newly set goals besides the traditional representation of distributions on maps, user-friendly analysis possibilities were developed, making rapid inquiries of information on species, geographical areas and area-specific nature protection questions possible. Gradated user access makes differentiated data security possible. ZOBODAT is to be expanded into a user-friendly information system for scientists, nature protection authorities and the public. ... [Information of the supplier]
This is the ZooBank prototype, providing access to 1.5 million scientific names of animals. This prototype is based on Thomson Zoological's "Index of Organism Names", which is the electronic archive of Zoological Record, going back to 1978 (vol. 115). A project to digitise the remaining volumes of Zoological Record back to 1864 (vol. 1), is nearing completion. These names will therefore soon also be available through ZooBank. The next version of ZooBank, coming later in 2007, will provide an interface for the voluntary submission of animal names. If a mandatory registration system is eventually adopted by the zoological community, we anticipate that in the very near future ZooBank will become a complete, authoritative, record of all scientific names of animals. ... [Information of the supplier]
Amongst the major targets of the ZooSphere project are: An international repository and web hub for high resolution image sequences of biological specimen; Delivering content to various end user devices, such as dekstop computers, mobile devices and web browsers in general; Create a tool for scientists, especially taxonomists, to speed up and improve their research; Prevent physical object transfer via regular mail; Reduce travel costs and efforts related to local object inspection; Digital preservation of biological collection objects, which are subject to natural decay; Increasing the visibility and accesibility of biological collection objects; Making objects available to both: general public and scientists. The ZooSphere project is in a very early stage. Yet it already yields excellent results concerning the automatic high resolution image sequence capturing of biological collection objects. We preferably release all software and web components as early as possible, though they are still subject of frequent change. Thereby, we would like to gain early feedback and cooperations, to increase the efficiency of our work. You are welcome to send any feedback or suggestions via mail to: contact@zoosphere.net ... [Information of the supplier]
The combined herbaria of the University and ETH Zürich include some 3.5 Mio specimens of vascular plants, mosses, algae and fungi from all areas of the world. The herbarium of the Sukkulenten-Sammlung Zürich focuses entirely on the diversity of succulent plants from all over the world and counts about 25.000 specimens. ... [Information of the supplier]
