Biodiversity

• Biodiversity Hotspots (http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org/xp/Hotspots/). Under the umbrella of Conservation International, the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science has partnered with the Intel Corporation to build a Web site that focuses on 25 critically threatened ecosystems, or hotspots. The intention is to categorize and prioritize areas on all continents where biodiversity is at greatest risk and provide information about them for the purposes of planning and decision-making.

• NatureServe (http://www.natureserve.org/). NatureServe is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and providing knowledge about the world's natural diversity. Working with member programs in the United States, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean known as the Natural Heritage Network collects and develops authoritative information about the plants, animals, and ecological communities of the Western Hemisphere.

• Tree of Life (http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html). This "distributed Internet project containing information about phylogeny and biodiversity" was conceived and designed by two biologists at the University of Arizona. Currently there are 289 authoritative contributors to the 1,320 pages on 20 computers in four countries. Pages provide extensive bibliographies to relevant published literature.

• Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Reports (http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/Reports.aspx). In 2001, the United Nations initiated the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to examine ecosystem change, conservation, and sustainability. Over the next 4 years, 1300 experts worldwide contributed to create "a state-of-the-art scientific appraisal of the condition and trends in the world’s ecosystems and the services they provide."

• Bioinformatics for Biodiversity (http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/biodiversity2000.shl). Taken from "Science" Special Issue of 29 September 2000, this site takes a look at the emerging science of "biodiversity informatics"-- the efforts under way to make the vast, decentralized resources of global biodiversity information available in digital form, and the enormous challenge of imposing consistency and compatibility among the scores of searchable databases on the world's biota.
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