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What is The BioDiversity Institute?BDI was founded in 1995 to advance the causes of biodiversity conservation and resource management through public education and by supplying relevant information to a variety of users via the Web. BDI's founders have extensive related experience, having developed six generations of information systems -- including the current Biological and Conservation Data System (winner of a Computerworld Smithsonian Award) -- used by the hemisphere-wide network of Natural Heritage Data Centers. The collective data of the Natural Heritage Network is one of the most used and useful databases in the biodiversity and conservation fields.
We hope you’ll like and use the BDI Internet Field Guide. BDI is a 501c3a publicly-supported charitable and membership organization. Donations to it are fully tax-deductible. Other sections of this site describe how you could help us accomplish our job. We hope you’ll help. Structurally BDI is an interesting institution, perhaps the wave of the future. It exists in cyberspace with no fixed headquarters or concentrations of personnel, thus minimizing overhead and operating with great efficiency. Every dollar donated to it is thus used to maximum effect. Copyright 2003, BioDiversity Institute |
We
have become particularly interested in the impediments to biological
knowledge and nature appreciation that are imposed by the difficulty
many or most people have in finding out things they would like to
know about nature without devoting more time and energy to the task
than their busy lives allow. We think that one of the most imposing
barriers is the inability of most people to learn the proper names
of species – and that this age-old impediment has always prevented
many more people from being drawn into a deeper interest in nature,
biology, and conservation. Therefore we have turned our attention
to helping with this problem by developing innovative new identification
aids accessible to anyone over the Internet. We’ve designed this
guide to be usable not just by experts or specialists but by a wide
and varied audience that is not as yet knowledgeable or committed,
thereby reconnecting them to nature, and we hope, recruiting them
to the biodiversity conservation cause.