World and General

General

These general sites contain broad scale biodiversity and taxonomic data and links to other data sources.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that is working to make the world's biodiversity data accessible anywhere in the world.

Species 2000 has the objective of enumerating all known species of organisms on Earth (animals, plants, fungi and microbes) as the baseline dataset for studies of global biodiversity.

BIOSIS Index to Organism Names. BIOSIS delivers flexible information services - including databases and customized information products - to the global life sciences community. Biosis selects documents from thousands of sources worldwide; indexes and abstracts them into citations which describe their content; and maintains Databases for searching citations - adding more than 600,000 new entries each year.

BioNET-INTERNATIONAL The Global Network for Taxonomy

Biodiversity and Biological Collections. This site is devoted to information of interest to systematists and other biologists of the organismic kind. Within these pages you will find information about specimens in biological collections, taxonomic authority files, directories of biologists, the Delta system and links for hundreds of biodiversity and collection resources.

Tree Of Life. The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 4000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics.

Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS).

Discover Life helps you to identify things, share ways to teach and study nature's wonders, use maps, report your findings, and contribute to and learn from the Web's growing encyclopedia of life.

Identification

The following sites provide overviews of identification aids available.

Lucid, Centre for Biological Information Technology, Brisbane. Lucid tools are powerful and highly flexible knowledge management software applications designed to help users with identification or diagnostic tasks. Lucid identification keys are currently being used by a wide range of end-users, from primary, high school and university students to taxonomists, quarantine identifiers, biodiversity scientists and conservation managers. For more information on Lucid keys that have been developed, go to Key Search button on the web page.

The World Biodiversity Database (WBD) produced by ETI bioinformatics 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 17 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.

Identification aids and keys, on the German GTI web page provides a useful overview of keys currently available for Animals, Plants and Fungi from all regions.

Discover Life helps you to identify things, share ways to teach and study nature's wonders, use maps, report your findings, and contribute to and learn from the Web's growing encyclopedia of life.

For information on Specific groups

Microorganisms

WDCM World Data Centre for Microorganisms

WSL World Species List - Animals Plants Microbes [Natural Features Registry Institute, Lewes, Delaware, USA]

Plants

World List of Cetrariod Lichens

Tropicos. This site provides access to the Missouri Botanical Garden's VAST (VAScular Tropicos) nomenclatural database and associated authority files.

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, ePIC. ePIC is a major project to bring together all of Kew's digitised information about plants and make it easier to search. You can use it to pinpoint information of interest in our varied collections, bibliographies, nomenclators and checklists, publications and taxonomic works, as well as links to information resources provided by external organisations. Where further information from Kew is available online, you will be directed to it.

BRAHMS online plant databases Quick links are provided to online systems using Brahms here.

World List of Cetrariod Lichens

LIAS A Global Information System for Lichenized and Non-Lichenized Ascomycetes

www.speciesfungorum.org. The world database of names of fungi, and including several other databases relating to Mycology

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.

Insecta

Nomina Circumscribentia Insectorum

Ephemeroptera of the World

Earwig Reasearch Centre: Dermaptera of the World / Earwigs of the World

OSF Orthoptera Species File

Katydids or bush-crickets (Tettigonioidea)

Fleas (Siphonaptera) of the World [Zoological Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia] in English

The Diptera site

GloBIS The Global Butterfly Information System

Coleoptera.org

An International Society Devoted to the Study of Beetles

Diptera.org

Social Insects World Wide Web: Antbase

Arachnida & Spiders

The World Spider Catalogue by Norman I. Platnick

Mollusca, Chaeotgnatha & Annelida

Chaetognatha: A list of valid familes, genera and species

Annelid Geographic Faunal Lists and Directories: North America, Europe, British Isles, Australia, World Wide.

Vertebrates

FishBase. A Global Information System on Fishes

Inter-institutional Database of Fish Biodiversity

Amphibian Species of the World

MSW Mammal Species of the World [Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C., USA]

Mammal Networked Information System Seventeen North American institutions and their collaborators are developing a network of distributed databases of mammal specimen data.

Europe

ETI - Expert Centre for Taxonomic Identification. ETI is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in operational relations with UNESCO. Their mission is to develop and produce scientific and educational computer-aided information systems, to improve the general access to and promote the broad use of taxonomic and biodiversity knowledge worldwide.

The EUNIS web application provides access to publicly available data in a consolidated database

The information includes:

• Data on Species, Habitats and Sites compiled in the framework of NATURA2000 (EU Habitats and Birds Directives),
• Data collected from frameworks, data sources or material published by ETC/NPB (formerly the European Topic Centre for Nature Conservation).
• Information on Species, Habitats and Sites taken into account in relevant international conventions or from International Red Lists.
• Specific data collected in the framework of the EEA's reporting activities, which also constitute a core set of data to be updated periodically.

European Register of Marine Species, Taxonomy – online databases

Euro+Med Plantbase - a new initiative in plant systematics - The Information Resource for Euro-Mediterranean Plant Diversity

Atlas Florae Europaeae Database (AFE) (E)

Fauna Europaea Links to other taxonomic resources

For information on Specific groups

Plants

PLANTS

Plant Conservation in European Countries and Plant Talk. These country pages provide contacts, information and web links on plant conservation.

Plant Talk Web Links. Here are our top web links for plant conservation. We hope you will find them as useful as we do. Most work on plant conservation is of course national rather than international in scope, so we are building pages on plant conservation in individual countries – only for Europe so far – with useful web links. Please take a look – Comments as always very welcome!

This site provides access to the Missouri Botanical Garden's VAST (VAScular Tropicos) nomenclatural database and associated authority files.

BRAHMS online plant databases

Euro+Med Plantbase

This guide contains links to, and information about major botanical resources on the Internet. The primary aim is to provide direct access to research related information. A number of botany resources are brought together to enable further exploration.

Fungi & Lichens

LIAS – A Global Information System for Lichenized and Non-Lichenized Ascomycetes

UNITE a molecular database for the identification of ectomycorrhizal fungi

Bacteria

LBSN List of Bacterial Names with Standing in Nomenclature

Crustacea

Crustacea Interactive Key

Copepod world list

Insects and Arachnids

Cerambycidae - western Palearctic

Elateridae - Palearctic

Coleoptera (exhaustive photogallery) – Central Europe

Mollusca, Chaeotgnatha & Annelida

CLEMAM Check List of European Marine Mollusca (France)

Vertebrates

Inter-institutional Database of Fish Biodiversity

Marine

European Marine Biodiversity Datasets

The Admiralty Bay Benthos Biodiversity Database (Belgian)

Mar-Eco

Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data

Countries

Coleoptera: Carabus

Estonian Orchids (36 species descriptions, distribution maps, photos)

Checklists of Estonian bryophytes and lichens. Contacts of relevant experts in Estonia

GfBS-Homepage hosts many links ...

Database on Dutch Flora inventory data

UNESCO IOC- Register of Marine Organisms the Netherlands

Database on the Iberian fauna (Proyecto Fauna Ibérica):

Database on Flora Ibérica –vascular plants- (Proyecto ANTHOS): An online database system , which allows to generate online maps

Databank on Canary Islands biodiversity (Proyecto BIOTA Canarias)

GBIF Spanish Node –GBIF ESPAÑA: Databases on spanish biodiversity, specially megadata on collections and collection specimens

Database on Catalonian Biodiversity

The Virtual Flora (Virtuella Floran, Sweden) (species info and maps, Nordic, Europe) (E)

Nordic Vegetationtypes - database (Nordic Council of Ministers) (E)

Centre Suisse de Cartographie de la Faune

The Marine Life Information Network for Britain and Ireland. Information to support marine environmental management, protection and education

The JNCC is the UK Government's wildlife adviser, undertaking national and international conservation work on behalf of the three country nature conservation agencies English Nature, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Countryside Council for Wales.