This site merges the book A Guide to Field Guides: Identifying the Natural History of North America by Diane Schmidt, Biology Librarian at the University of Illinois, and its companion Web site International Field Guides. After the publisher returned copyright to the book, the author decided to combine the two products and create a searchable database of field guides for plants, animals, and other objects in North America and around the world. Except where noted, all guides listed here were personally examined by the author. As used in this site, a field guide is a small, lightweight book used to identify plants, animals, or other objects. It is designed to be used outdoors and usually contains many illustrations, whether drawings or photographs, and limited text. Generally speaking, field guides are used by amateurs, hence the emphasis on visual identification. There are a number of different technical manuals, atlases, floras and faunas, handbooks, and keys for the use of professionals which are not listed here. ... [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]
Plazi is an association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature. To this end Plazi will: (1) Maintain a digital taxonomic literature repository to enable archiving of taxonomic treatments. (2) Enhance submitted taxonomic treatments by creating taxonx XML versions. (3) Participate in the development of new models for publishing taxonomic treatments in order to maximize interoperability with other relevant cyberinfrastructure components (e.g., name servers, biodiversity resources, etc...). (4) Advocate and educate about the vital importance of maintaining free and open access to scientific discourse and data. ... [Information of the supplier]
BioConcepts is a multilingual database which documents the origin and definition of basic biological concepts. It serves as a guide to the first uses of words, influential definitions and shifts of meaning through history. The database started life in 2008 as a supplement to the handbook Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie. Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (HWB) which was published in three volumes by Verlag J.B. Metzler in 2011. BioConcepts is focused on terms of general biology, i.e. those concepts which apply to all living beings (e.g. ‘organism’, ‘evolution’, or ‘gene’); terms related to particular forms of life (e.g. ‘flower’, ‘heart’, or ‘seeing’) are for the most part not included (the exceptions to this rule refer to important concepts for wide spread phenomena like ‘sexuality’, ‘social behaviour’, or ‘symbiosis’). Currently, the database comprises approximately 8,000 quotations in about 2,000 main entries. In order to find the oldest occurrences of the words the huge corpora of digitalized texts (e.g. JSTOR or GoogleBooks) have been systematically searched. As many of the quotations have been included by students and are not yet checked and revised there are still inconsistencies and incomplete quotations in the database. They will be removed in the process of revision that is currently taking place. By mid-2015 the revision should be completed (by December 2014 entries in the categories ranging from "adaptation" to "regeneration" have been revised). You may help to improve the database by including quotations or hints to quotations in the section “Your feedback” at the end of each entry. ... [Information of the supplier]