Have you ever longed for a Google map of koala bears? Bald
eagles? Red pandas? A team of researchers from Yale and the
University Colorado at Boulder have made it happen. This month
they released a demo version of a Web-based “Map of Life”
intended to eventually reflect the distribution of all plant and
animal life on earth. The tool is constantly growing and
evolving, but at present it maps the known distribution of over
25,000 different species of terrestrial vertebrates and North
American freshwater fish, based on over 200 years of data from
field guides, museums, citizen scientists and groups like the
Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the International
Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife
Fund. The demo version allows users to search by species,
viewing a map of all known distributions, or to view a list of
all species records within 50 to 1,000 kilometers (30 to 620
miles) of any specific spot on the map. “The idea for this
project really dates back to my days as a Ph.D. st