ActionBioscienceis

ActionBioscienceis a non-commercial, educational web site sponsored by the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) . It was created to promote bioscience literacy and bring attention to seven bioscience issues of critical current importance: Biodiversity, 2Environment, 3) Genomics, 4)Biotechnology, 5)Evolution, 6) New Frontiers, and 7) Science Education.

Animal Diversity Web

Animal Diversity Web (ADW) is an online database that collects the natural history, classification, species characteristics, conservation biology, and distribution information of thousands of species of animals. It includes thousands of photographs, hundreds of sound clips, and a virtual museum.

The ADW acts as an online encyclopedia, with each individual species account displaying basic information specific to that species. Each species account includes geographic range, habitat, physical description, reproduction, life span, communication and perception, behavior, food habits, predation, and conservation status.

Animal Genome Size Database

The Animal Genome Size Database is a comprehensive catalogue of published genome size estimates for vertebrate and invertebrate animals. It was created in 2001 by Dr. T. Ryan Gregory of the University of Guelph in Canada. As of September 2005, the database contains data for over 4,000 species of animals. A similar database, the Plant DNA C-values Database (C-value being analogous to genome size in diploid organisms) was created by researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in 1997.

Animal Science Image Gallery

The Animal Science Image Gallery a new service for teachers announced by The Animal and Dairy News. Teachers can obtain images in the Animal Science Image Gallery. The site contains images, animations, and video for classroom and outreach learning in the Animal Sciences. Each file in the gallery has passed at least two peer reviews to optimize the image and its metadata, and to ensure that the information is sufficient and accurate. The gallery is searchable via keywords or teachers can browse by subject, download images at no cost, and use them freely for educational purposes.

Bioinformatic Harvester

The Bioinformatic Harvester is a bioinformatic meta search engine at KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for genes and protein-associated information. Harvester currently works for human, mouse, rat, zebrafish, drosophila and arabidopsis thaliana based information. Harvester cross-links >28 popular bioinformatic resources and allows cross searches. A ranking system similar to Google pagerank sorts the search results and displays the more relevant information. Harvester serves 10.000s of pages every day to scientists and physicians.

Catalogue of Life

The Catalogue of Life, started in June 2001 by Species 2000 and Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), is planned to become a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth by the year 2011. 66 taxonomic databases with contributions from more than 3,000 specialists from around the world are compiled into it and are also reviewed. The Catalogue contains the Annual Checklist (published yearly, ninth edition contains 1,160,711 species) + Dynamic Checklist (less extensive, updated more often, contains additional regional species checklists).

Earth Human STR Allele Frequencies Database

The Earth Human STR Allele Frequencies Database is a scientific project based on a dynamic web interface and a relational database management system. Its main purpose is the management of STR populational data reported from all over the world, providing highly specialized population genetics tools and also an overview of world population genetic structure at global scale.

At the bottom of EHSTRAFD approach stays peer-review journals standardization trend in publishing populational data and most important, the allele frequencies gradient distribution over vast geographical areas.

Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world. It aims to build one "infinitely expandable" page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text. In addition, the Encyclopedia will incorporate the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which will contain the digitized print collections from the world's major natural history libraries. The project is initially backed by a US$50 million funding commitment, led by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.

The EOL went live on 26 February 2008 with 30,000 entries. The site immediately proved to be extremely popular, and temporarily had to revert to demonstration pages for two days when it was overrun by traffic from over 11 million views it received.

At this time, the project's steering committee has senior officers from Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Field Museum, Harvard University, MacArthur Foundation, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Sloan Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Encyclopedia of Life Sciences

The Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (ELS) is an encyclopedia that spans the entire spectrum of life sciences and is published by Wiley-Blackwell.

ELS is available online and as a 26-volume print edition. The online edition was launched in April 2001, with the print edition published in January 2002. At the end of 2004, ELS was acquired by Wiley-Blackwell from the Nature Publishing Group. 2,414 new and updated articles have been added since then. January 2009 has seen the introduction of a new logo and a new and improved homepage for ELS.

Articles are written by leaders in the field and cover subjects from areas as diverse as ecology and cell biology. As of December 2008, there are now 4,373 article topics published in ELS online, of which 837 also include updated versions.

FishBase

FishBase is a comprehensive database of information about fish. As of October 2008, it included descriptions of over 30,000 species, over 260,000 common names in hundreds of languages, over 46,000 pictures, and references to more than 42,000 works in the scientific literature.

Flora Europaea

The Flora Europaea is a 5-volume encyclopedia of plants, published between 1964 and 1993 by Cambridge University Press. The aim was to bring together all the national Floras of Europe into a single, authoritative publication, allowing any plant found wild or widely cultivated in Europe to be identified to subspecies level. Information on geographical distribution, habitat preference and chromosome number is also given, where known.

The Flora was released in CD form in 2001, and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is making it available online.

Integrated Taxonomic Information System

The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) is a partnership designed to provide consistent and reliable information on the taxonomy of biological species. ITIS was originally formed in 1996 as an interagency group within the U.S. federal government, involving agencies from the Department of Commerce to the Smithsonian Institution. It has now become an international body, with Canadian and Mexican government agencies participating. The primary focus of ITIS is North American species, but many groups are worldwide and ITIS continues to collaborate with other international agencies to increase its global coverage.

Plant DNA C-values Database

The Plant DNA C-values Database is a comprehensive catalogue of C-value (nuclear DNA content, or in diploids, genome size) data for land plants and algae. The database was created by Prof. Michael D. Bennett and Dr. Ilia J. Leitch of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. The database was originally launched as the "Angiosperm DNA C-values Database" in April 1997, essentially as an online version of collected data lists that had been published by Prof. Bennett and colleagues since the 1970s. Release 1.0 of the more inclusive Plant DNA C-values Database was launched in 2001, with subsequent releases 2.0 in January 2003 and 3.0 in December 2004. In addition to the angiosperm dataset made available in 1997, the database has been expanded taxonomically several times and now includes data from pteridophytes (since 2000), gymnosperms (since 2001), bryophytes (since 2001), and algae (since 2004). (Note that each of these subset databases is cited individually as they may contain different sets of authors). As of September 2005, the database as a whole contains data for over 4,800 species of plants in these various taxa. A similar Animal Genome Size Database was created in 2001 by Dr. T. Ryan Gregory of the University of Guelph, Canada.

Plants For A Future

Plants For A Future (PFAF) is an online not for profit resource for those interested in edible and useful plants of temperate regions. The project currently has two sites in the South West of England where many of the plants are being grown on a trial basis, and maintains a small mail order catalogue. The organization's emphasis is on perennial plants.

The website contains an online database of over 7000 plants that can be grown in the UK, the data is created/collated by Ken Fern, it was programmed and is maintained by Rich Morris, and can be either used online free of charge, or downloaded for a small sum.

Fern has also published a book detailing many of the plants featured in the database.

Tree of Life Web Project

The Tree of Life Web Project is an ongoing Internet project providing information about the diversity and phylogeny of life on Earth. This collaborative peer reviewed project began in 1995, and is written by biologists from around the world.

The pages are linked hierarchically, in the form of the branching evolutionary tree of life, organized cladistically. Each page contains information about one particular group of organisms and is organized according to a branched tree-like form, thus showing hypothetical relationships between different groups of organisms.

In 2009 the project ran into funding problems from the University of Arizona. Pages and Treehouses now submitted take a considerably longer time to be approved as they're being reviewed by a small group of volunteers.

VADLO

VADLO is a life sciences search engine, privately owned by Life in Research, LLC., based in Illinois, USA. VADLO caters to life sciences and biomedical researchers, educators, students, clinicians and reference librarians. In addition to providing focused search on biology research methods, databases, online tools and software, VADLO is also a resource for powerpoints on biomedical topics, mainly for which, VADLO was named one of the top 10 Health Search Engines of 2008 by AltSearchEngines.

Wikispecies

Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive free content catalogue of all species and is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Jimmy Wales, chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, stated that editors are not required to fax in their degrees, but that submissions will have to pass muster with a technical audience. Wikispecies is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Started in August 2004, with biologists across the world invited to contribute, the project had grown a framework encompassing the Linnaean taxonomy with links to Wikipedia articles on individual species by April 2005.