The Avian Knowledge Network (AKN) is an international organization of government and non-government institutions focused on understanding the patterns and dynamics of bird populations across the Western Hemisphere. The goal is to educate the public on the dynamics of bird populations, provide interactive decision-making tools for land managers, make available a data resource for scientific research, and advance new exploratory analysis techniques to study bird populations. Additionally, the AKN has gathered over 1300 environmental, climate, and human demographic variables that are linked to all AKN bird observation locations. The AKN is organizing observation-based bird monitoring in three fundamental ways. First, we are developing new ways to discover these data by displaying metadata in the bird monitoring data registry (BMDR). Second, we are expanding existing data schemas to organize these data through the bird monitoring data exchange (BMDE). Third, we are building the technical infrastructure to allow access to these data through a federated data grid environment. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
This site is being made to speed up the general identification of dried specimens of Neotropical plants. It will be most useful to professional biologists and others doing species inventories of natural areas, ecology, and ethnobotany. It will be useful for identifying families, genera or plant species in regions for which comprehensive field guides are not available, or where manuals depend on the use of technical floral or fruit characters absent in the voucher specimens. It will even be useful to paleobotanists and others with interest in comparative morphology of tropical plants. To this end we are providing a desktop reference set of high-quality images of dried herbarium specimens for comparison. These will represent a broad range of Neotropical genera and common species. The underlying strategy is to have just a few examples of each species, specimens that are typical or illustrative of that species. Preference is given to specimens that have a good set of leaves as well as flowers or fruit, and to specimens with an authoritative identification. Specimens of juveniles will be included when available and when significantly different in appearance from adults. ... [Information of the supplier]
