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]
The International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases is a not for profit scientific and educational association, affiliated to the International Union of Biological Sciences, formed to establish international collaboration among biological database projects so as to promote the wider and more effective dissemination of information about the World's heritage of biological organisms for the benefit of the world at large. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Index Fungorum, the world database of fungal names coordinated and supported by the Index Fungorum Partnership, contains names of fungi (including yeasts, lichens, chromistan fungi, protozoan fungi and fossil forms) at species level and below. Funding from GBIF (2003-2004) under the ECAT work programme will enable the addition of all missing author citations and year of publication and the linking of all homotypic names. New names from the Index of Fungi, compiled by CABI Bioscience and published by CABI Publishing, are added every three months. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 3000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Each page contains information about a particular group of organisms (e.g., echinoderms, tyrannosaurs, phlox flowers, cephalopods, club fungi, or the salamanderfish of Western Australia). ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things. ... [Information of the supplier]
The World Biodiversity Database (WBD) is a continuously growing taxonomic database and information system that allows you to search and browse a number of online species banks covering a wide variety of organisms. The 20 species banks accessible through the WBD offer taxonomic information, species names, synonyms, descriptions, illustrations and literature references, as well as online identification keys and interactive geographical information systems. The WBD currently includes 25472 unique taxa, plus 3958 synonyms. The online publication of several projects was made possible by the financial support of NLBIF. ... [Information of the supplier]
Palaeos bietet vielseitige Informationen zur Evolution des Lebens. Unter dem Begriff „Leben“ sind die Reiche und Gruppen Bakterien, Eukaryoten, Pilze, Pflanzen, Wirbellose und Chordaten dargestellt. Mit Kladogrammen werden die stammesgeschichtlichen Zusammenhänge und weitere systematische Ebenen erläutert. Unter dem Begriff „Zeit“ wird die Entwicklung des Lebens nach Erdzeitaltern zusammen mit den geologischen Einheiten und Veränderungen geschildert. ... [Redaktion vifabio]
The Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) is an international initiative devoted to developing DNA barcoding as a global standard in taxonomy. CBOL has more than 130 Member Organizations from 40 countries. DNA Barcoding is a technique that uses a short gene sequence from a standardized region of the genome as a diagnostic “biomarker” for species. Different species have different DNA barcodes, making it possible to use barcodes to: (1) identify specimens, (2) discover possible new species, and (3) to make taxonomy more effective for science and society. ... [Information of the supplier]
CATE stands for Creating a Taxonomic e-Science and is a project funded by the United Kingdom's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) under its e-science initiative. The particular goal of CATE is to test the feasibility of creating a web-based, consensus taxonomy using two model groups, one from the plant and the other from the animal kingdom. The wider aim is to explore practically the idea of 'unitary' taxonomy (see below) and promote web-based revisions as a source of authoritative information about groups of organisms for specialist and non-specialist users.The project team is from a consortium composed of the Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, University of Oxford and Imperial College London (NERC Centre for Population Biology). Kew's major collaborator for the providing taxonomic information on the Araceae is Dr Thomas B Croat and his Araceae research centre at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, USA. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) is an online workbench that aids collection, management, analysis, and use of DNA barcodes. It consists of 3 components (MAS, IDS, and ECS) that each address the needs of various groups in the barcoding community. It provides a repository for barcode records, storing specimen data and images as well as sequences and trace files. It provides an efficient interface for submitting barcode records to GenBank. It provides an identification engine based on the current barcode library. It monitors the number of barcode sequence records and species coverage. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
The PhyloCode is a formal set of rules governing phylogenetic nomenclature. It is designed to name the parts of the tree of life by explicit reference to phylogeny. The PhyloCode will go into operation in a few years, but the exact date has not yet been determined. It is designed so that it may be used concurrently with the existing codes based on rank-based nomenclature (ICBN, ICZN, etc.). We anticipate that many people whose research concerns phylogeny will find phylogenetic nomenclature advantageous. ... [Information of the supplier]