Now over 500,000 species and over 350 million records in Map of Life, with new ways to discover

We are pleased to announce that Map of Life has grown significantly to include almost all taxa. This now takes us far beyond the focus on terrestrial vertebrates of the original Map of Life demo website launched almost a year.   If you haven’t peaked at the Dashboard in a while, or searched on your favorite plant or invertebrate species, try it now!  Whether its trees of North America, palms of the New World, or the beetles of Canada and Alaska, there is more to discover than ever before. Try out mappinglife.org/Socratea exorrhiza (the Walking Palm) to get a flavor.  And check back for additional data sets in the future.

We have also made significant improvements to the user experience, and one highlight is the way you can now retrieve information about underlying biodiversity data sources right from the map. With a species mapped, set the “Identify Layers” option to “On”. You can now click anywhere on the map and get more information about which data sources support the occurrence of a species in the area. You’ll see a pop-up box with the different data types, and when you click on a data type, you can look at the individual records more fully, even getting links to the original sources.

We’ll be announcing a lot more new and exciting developments on Map of Life in the near future, so we hope you’ll check in often and give us continued feedback.

Your Yale and Colorado Map of Life Team