The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology provides the searchable Animal Diversity Web database, with species accounts (images and text) of some of the world's mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, sharks, bony fishes, mollusks, arthropods and echinoderms. The database is searchable by common or scientific name. For each species account, information includes scientific and common name,...

Designed as a vehicle for showcasing the extraordinary biological diversity of Mexico, this well-designed site is rather user-friendly, and provides a host of material about the flora and fauna of the country. Visitors can dive right in by looking through the "Animals," "Plants," or "Places" sections of the site. Within each section, visitors can read brief essays, search for various animals or...

Several international agreements, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, highlight the need for open, shared access to global biodiversity data. To that end, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) has been established to facilitate "the compilation, linking, standardization, digitization and global dissemination of the world's biodiversity data." The GBIF homepage provides...

Several British conservation and natural resource organizations have collaborated to form the National Biodiversity Network (NBN), a network of biodiversity data. After the free registration, users can access the NBN gateway, which hosts a large variety of datasets that can be navigated by species name or site location. Results allow users to view 10km distribution maps of the selected species....

The World Information Network on Biodiversity (REMIB) is organized and provided by Mexico's National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of the Biodiversity. REMIB is a network of shared biological information databases from research centers in Mexico, the US, Costa Rica, and Spain. The databases contain "curatorial, taxonomic, ecological, cartographic, bibliographic, ethno-biological type, use...