About Zipcode Zoo

• The Concept
• Behind the Scenes
• Acknowledgments

The Concept

ZipcodeZoo.com aspires to be a useful Field Guide to plants and animals of the world. Often, to be useful, a field guide must have a sense of where you are and what might be found there.

• For every professional naturalist who has made a positive identification of some species, there are 10,000 amateurs wondering what they have just seen. There are many books to assist in the task of identification, but most cover species of a wide geographic range -- "Birds of America" -- even though most species occur in smaller geographic ranges. If you are trying to identify something you have just seen, the grand book of everything is too much. Too much information can be cumbersome. For identification, a good field guide could be localized to your back yard.
• There are many species that look the same, and can be distinguished only by genetic analysis or by knowing where they were found. If your Field Guide contains many finches or salamanders that could not possibly be found in your back yard, it increases your chance of a misidentification. Too much information can sometimes mislead.

We want to build an online field guide suited for the amateur naturalist. Here are highlights of what we have done so far:

• We've added information on 3,156,243 species from around the world. Zipcode Zoo is not just for Americans (and more than half our visitors don't live in the land of zipcodes.)
• We've added lots of photos – 331,922 photos taken by 1,496 photographers – because only with multiple photos can we clearly see differences between individuals of different age, sex, season, condition, and activity. Individuals of a species may differ in look from each other; these differences may be important in natural interactions, and absolutely need to be seen if the naturalist is to identify an observation correctly. Whereas the high cost of producing photos for books limits traditional texts to one or two photos per species, the Internet makes possible this unlimited use of photos.
• With photos, as with other information, we care about quality. We are blessed to have had so many contributors of high quality photos, and sometimes give awards for Photographer of the Month.
• We've been gathering field observations -- 180,206,609 so far -- and mapping them with the help of Google, to help you see exactly where a plant or animal has been reported.
• Finding just the right species in all of this can be like finding a needle in a haystack. A Proximity Lister and a Region Lister will help you find plants or animals in a geographic area of interest. PlantFinder offers 19 criteria to narrow your selection of plants. PlantFinder's database currently includes 1,555,827 attributes for 209,411 of the 1,424,190 plants on this site. BirdFinder uses location and 102,204 attributes for 4,753 birds.
• We've added popup definitions for 227,060 terms. For many terms such as "abdominal", the popup definition pronounces the term. Short definitions such as that for "entire" simply popup on mouse over, then go away. Other definitions, such as that for "abdominal" open in small windows.
• We've added Quiz to develop skill matching the bird, mammal, fish, or amphibian with the sounds it makes. Quiz also includes a dozen interactive crossword puzzles that will challenge and build your vocabulary.
• We added automatic inference of a visitor's location (from their IP address), and a means for a visitor to supply their correct location by clicking here.
• We've built localized lists of Invasives Near You and Threatened Near You to list local Invasives and threatened species.
• For locations in the U.S., the home page includes Places to Explore, which lists name, address, phone, and url of a variety of places of interest within 50 miles of your home. Places are listed by proximity to you, and include links to an area map and driving directions. Locations in the U.S. also have links to current weather info and to demographic info about the local area.
• We have Slideshows. View slideshows of favorite plants and animals, or of our favorite places, or of photos taken by our great photographers.
• We've given the naturalist an efficient way to record their observations with the LifeList button at the bottom of every species page.
• We've made a start at sorting through identifications with Key, a tool that helps you step through kingdom, phylum, class, order, and family to help you decide what species you have at hand.
• We've sought feedback. Every page provides a button to report a problem on the page, and pages with info on a plant or animal provide a button to allow you to suggest edits to that page.
• Our users come from around the world, so with a single click on a link at the bottom of any of 3,156,243 pages, you may read the page in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, or Spanish.

We can do better. In the next year, our efforts will include:

• More information for each species, particularly common species.
• Improved capability to create "flash cards" for your field trips. In the works now: a Butterfly Finder.
• Better writing. Amateur naturalists don't need to be patronized, but everyone deserves readable prose. Plants and animals are interesting. Information about them should be, too.
• More photos that are simply bigger and better. Plants and animals are beautiful. They deserve great photos.
• Better maps, with animation showing how populations migrate, or are changing over time.
• Data sharing with other organizations. We offer non-profit organizations the photos that we have taken for their own use in serving the plants and animals of the world.

Aren't there sites that do this already? In fact, there are many terrific wildlife sites. Some of our favorites include:

• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Digital Library System. The wildlife photos on this site are among the best in the world.
• BugGuide.net. This site is bursting with the efforts of naturalists collaborating to catalog and understand insects and spiders. The site is easy to use, and is simply loaded with fascinating photos and information.
• The Georgia Wildlife Web, a good example of a well-written localized site, intended "for use by the general public in the identification and study of the natural history of Georgia."
• Ben Victor's Photographic Guide to the Late-State Larvae of Coral Reef Fishes provides a great example of how mulitple photos can be effectively used to show age-related changes.

We won't be better than the many great wildlife sites. But we will likely be different. We will remember that every species has its place, and that place might or might not happen to be where you are. And we will try to remember what it was like to be 8 years old, and trying to pronounce Latin names and learn about wildlife from the books written by grownups for no one in particular.

Behind the Scenes

ZipcodeZoo.com is a project of the BayScience Foundation, Inc., a Non-Profit Private Operating Foundation, a 501(c)(3) under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. No donations are sought by the Foundation -- it lives on donations from David Stang and his wife. It is an operating foundation, meaning that it does something with its money, rather than simply dispensing it to others. For Stang, the Foundation is a labor of love -- he draws no salary.

If you wish to contact us, write Webmaster@ZipcodeZoo.com.

Acknowledgments

Our software for zooming and panning large images: ZipcodeZoo.com uses software developed and licensed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London (UCL) through the GeoVue research node of the ESRC National Center for e-Social Science (NCeSS).