Reference: USGS’s New Database Helps Users Map Biodiversity

From FCW:

A new Web-based federal resource makes more than 100 million mapped records of nearly every living species nationwide searchable by any user.
The Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) system allows users — often land managers, researchers, refuge managers, citizen scientists, agriculture professionals, fisheries managers, water resource managers, educators and others — to search for hundreds of thousands of species records in search fields ranging from the entire country and U.S. territories down to specific towns or parks.

 From USGS:

…BISON provides an “Area of Interest” search capability in which users can query by drawing the exact boundary around their area of interest, down to and including towns, villages, or even much smaller areas such as parks. For instance, New York City’s Central Park has more than 100,000 “species occurrences” recorded in BISON, with each species noted in detail. Other BISON search options include querying the species by scientific or common name, year range, state, county, basis of record, or provider institution.
As for the results, BISON displays them in both an interactive map and a list format. Users can click on each species occurrence point to retrieve more information, such as the institution providing the data, the collector, the date collected, and whether it was from a collection or an observation.  Further, occurrences can be dynamically visualized with more than 50 other layers of environmental information in the system. Extensive web services are also available for direct connections to other systems.
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BISON serves as the U.S. Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and will form an integral part of EcoINFORMA, the information delivery strategy in “Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy,” a recent report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Direct to BISON

Filed under: Data Files, Patrons and Users, Resources