Welcome to ITIS, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System! Here you will find authoritative taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world. We are a partnership of U.S., Canadian, and Mexican agencies (ITIS-North America); other organizations; and taxonomic specialists. ITIS is also a partner of Species 2000 and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). ... [Information of the supplier]
This digital archive of unique material relating to the society's priceless collections of specimens, manuscripts and letters will enable full global access for investigation allowing researchers to rapidly check details of the specimens on-line, including morphological details and written data. The information is of critical importance to correct naming and identification of specimens. The type specimens represent the original concept of new species, exemplified by the specimens and illustrations used when assigning binomial scientific names, the foundation stones of taxonomy. The Herbarium archive contains all 14,300 Linnaean plant specimens. This first phase of the Insects archive contains the Linnaean and Smithian butterflies and moths only. The remaining insects from the collection will be made available during 2009. The Fish archive contains all the 158 Linnaean fish specimens. ... [Information of the supplier]
The NCBI taxonomy database contains the names of all organisms that are represented in the genetic databases with at least one nucleotide or protein sequence. Click on the tree if you want to browse the taxonomic structure or retrieve sequence data for a particular group of organisms." (...) "The NCBI taxonomy database is not a primary source for taxonomic or phylogenetic information. Furthermore, the database does not follow a single taxonomic treatise but rather attempts to incorporate phylogenetic and taxonomic knowledge from a variety of sources, including the published literature, web-based databases, and the advice of sequence submitters and outside taxonomy experts. Consequently, the NCBI taxonomy database is not a phylogenetic or taxonomic authority and should not be cited as such. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Global Names Index is the first component of a semantic environment for biology called the Global Names Architecture GNA). GNI has been developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Encyclopedia of Life. It has benefited from the ideas of an array of gifted and enthusiastic individuals who contributed through the Nomina workshops that they attended. GNI was developed because of the central importance of the names of organisms in the management of data about organisms. The primary users of this site are not people, but other machines, so please don’t complain because the site is boring. ... [Information of the supplier]
ViBRANT recognised the need for a bibliography of life, i.e. a freely accessible bibliography of every taxonomic paper ever published. None of the currently available aggregators were satisfactory, so we have chosen to extend the Plazi bibliographic tool, RefBank. There are two primary reasons for this choice, first the original developer, Guido Sautter, is a partner in ViBRANT and second, RefBank contains a parsing tool that will turn Rod Page's "cryptic text strings" into structured references that can be easily transformed into any of the other conventional forms (see the Data Format Report). The bulk of RefBank's growth to date has come from ViBRANT contributed references, with 80,000 references being accumulated in the first six months of operation and another 85,000 references in the second six months. Work continues within ViBRANT to extract bibliographies from published works and parse them to generate more references. This work is to ensure that RefBank is seeded with sufficient references at launch so as to engage users. There was a significant development for RefBank in Autumn 2012 when it was the subject of a presentation and demonstration at TDWG 2013. Since when we have seen the addition of community contributed references. A more formal launch of RefBank, probably in conjunction with related ViBRANT developed tools, is planned for Summer/Autumn 2013. (http://vbrant.eu/content/communal-literature) ... [Miscellaneous as indicated]
Our objective is to provide free access for all scientists to the old zoological literature, particularly to those important publications where name-bearing zoological taxa were originally described. The literature is digitized in image format by the SUB Göttingen (our university library). In a first 2-year period (2003-2005) financed by the DFG we have digitized nearly all taxonomically relevant zoological literature from the beginnings until 1770 (about 400 works). Only some 5 % of the literature is not present in Göttingen and we are currently trying to obtain some works from other libraries. In a second 2-year-period we will try to cover the period from 1770 to 1800. Monographic works and journal articles shall both be digitized. The AnimalBase database is primarily established to link the old literature with the names of the animals described therein. We have continuously gone through the old works, from 1757 onwards, and entered all correctly described new animal names (genera and species taxa) by hand according to a standard established by our working group. (...) AnimalBase is a service provided by the University of Göttingen, Germany. Our work is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG. This page is under construction and we apologize for things not yet working perfectly. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
This January 2004 Catalog is more recent than the hardbound printed edition (April, 1998)—a 3-volume set of 2,905 pp. and a CD-ROM (see ordering information). Many errors have been corrected and new additions made in the on-line version. Treated in the "Catalog of Fishes" are about 56,000 described species and subspecies (= species) of fishes, about 10,600 genera and subgenera (= genera) of fishes, and about 21,700 references. Approximately 4,000 of the species names are not available for use because of technical reasons. About 26,000 species are valid ones, and about 25,000 are synonyms. About 200-300 new species are being described each year. Included in the on-line version are all species, genera, and references, along with the classification, introduction, and list of museum abreviations. Other parts of the printed version are not included, such as the interpretation of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (Appendix A), and the species and genera in a classification (which can be simulated with appropriate searches), and Appendix B. This is the first treatment of all described fishes since Linnaeus in 1758. Nearly all original descriptions have been located and examined by one or more of us. Some names not in current use have been found. Many mistakes in current literature are noted. We have also tried to determine the location of type specimens—entering information from available type catalogs, and the first author made visits to many major museums in search of information on types. ... [Information of the supplier]
ION is supposed to contain all the animal, plant, and virus names data found within the Thomson BIOSIS literature databases - Zoological RecordTM, BIOSIS Previews® and Biological Abstracts®. Bacteria names will be added soon. [Information of the supplier, modified]
Over 5 million bird specimens are housed in North American collections, documenting the composition, distribution, ecology, and systematics of the world's estimated 10,000-16,000 bird species. Millions of additional observational records are held in diverse data sets. ORNIS addresses the urgent call for increased access to these data in an open and collaborative manner, and involves development of a suite of online software tools for data analysis and error-checking. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation, expands on existing infrastructure developed for distributed mammal (MaNIS), amphibian and reptile (HerpNet), and fish (FishNet) databases. ... [Information of the supplier]
HerpNET is a collaborative effort by natural history museums to establish a global network of herpetological collections data, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF No. 0132303) and a GBIF DIGIT grant. The mission of HerpNET is to bring the accumulated knowledge from more than four million specimens in world-wide museum collections into currency for science and society by creating a distributed database with access from various portals. HerpNET will connect large repositories of information with smaller collections that have regional specializations. ... [Information of the supplier]