During the last ten years, the number and diversity of web portals dedicated to the collection of wildlife observations has increased rapidly. While there is substantial variation in the scope, geographical area, and volumes of data gathered by different portals, the advent of online data collection has produced a vast amount of data that would previously have been impossible to amass. The data contained in these portals and the sheer amplitude of their combined geographical and taxonomic coverage offer great potential for research on the temporal and spatial distribution of animals across large geographical areas. Data sources are very scattered, and several portals have limited access or are available only in the native languages of their host countries.
Given the diversity of initiatives and the well established nature of some of them, any attempt to favour only one of the systems or to create a new common one would be both undesirable and impractical. In order to make best use of the data gathered by online portals across the world, we therefore aim to provide a common directory of all these portals and its data repositories. WildlifeData.org can help you find the appropriate data repositories to access milions of wildlife observations or to deposit your own research data.
