The Missouri Botanical Garden offers this colorful and appealing Web site about Earth's biomes and aquatic ecosystems. Designed for kids, Biomes of the World offers loads of well-presented information on rainforest, taiga, tundra, desert, temperate deciduous forest, and grassland, as well as freshwater and marine ecosystems. Each biome or ecosystem includes pages of photos and facts covering...

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has released Number 4 of the series Issues in Ecology. Designed to present, "in language understandable to non-scientists, the consensus of a panel of scientific experts on issues relevant to the environment," the newest report (.pdf format) is entitled "Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Maintaining Natural Life Support Processes."

In the wake of the April 2000 World Resources Institute (WRI) report entitled "People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life" (described in the April 26, 2000 Scout Report for Science & Engineering), scientists are preparing to launch the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) -- a major international collaborative effort to map the health of the world's ecosystems. Slated for release in September...

This fun, interactive website was designed by NASA's earth observatory to introduce students to the Earth's Biomes. A biome, as defined by the site, is "a community of plants and animals living together in a certain kind of climate." This website provides links to seven different biomes that students can learn about including coniferous forests, grasslands, and tundras. Each separate biome page...

Founded in 1953, the "North American Benthological Society (NABS) is an international scientific organization whose purpose is to promote better understanding of the biotic communities of lake and stream bottoms and their role in aquatic ecosystems, by providing media and disseminating new investigation results, new interpretations, and other benthological information to aquatic biologists and to...

The World's Biomes, provided by the University California Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology, is an introduction to the earth's ecological regions. Biomes are the world's ecological communities, distinguishable by their predominant vegetation and by the organisms that have adapted to that vegetation. This site provides an introduction to the environmental and ecological features typical of various...