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]
Welcome to Online Taxonomic Keys, a joint project of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Royal BC Museum. This project seeks to facilitate the development of, and make readily available, a variety of regional and global identification keys in a format that is concise and easy to use. The information presented is compiled from published and unpublished works from taxonomic specialists worldwide. Taxonomic keys are important tools used by scientists and other investigators to identify specific organisms based on defining characteristics. Up until the last decade, these keys were most often published as dichotomous keys, in which specimens are identified by choosing from a progressive series of pairs of options until a solution is reached. While dichotomous keys are still universally used, the online arena provides the opportunity to design and use keys based on a character matrix. The identification keys on this site are based on a character matrix format. Specimens may be identified by selecting one or more character states (columns) for each character (rows). As selections are made a list of possible species identifications will appear at the bottom of the matrix. Clicking on the species name opens an information sheet with more information to help you understand the specimen you’ve identified. This library of identification keys is a work in progress, and will grow and expand as new keys become available. ... [Information of the supplier]
