The recent launch of the Encyclopedia of Life has generated quite a bit of excitement. It is my hope that advances such as this will help to make information about the millions of species that inhabit the planet accessible to everyone. It is the ultimate in open access science. In keeping with this, here is a list of biodiversity databases that are freely available to anyone. (I am sure to have missed some and I left out many taxon-specific pages — please leave me a comment or send me an email if you know of any other major resources and I will update the compilation).
- Amphibian Species of the World
- AmphibiaWeb
- AviBase
- Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD)
- Catalogue of Life
- Encyclopedia of Life
- Deep Green
- FishBase
- Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
- Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS)
- IUCN Red List
- Mammal Species of the World
- NCBI Entrez Taxonomy
- Nearctic Spider Database
- Reptile Database
- Species 2000
- Tree of Life
- World Biodiversity Database