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]
