TheAboutBiodiversity Web site is an effort to provide useful information on the great diversity of life on Earth. Scientists agree that such diversity — in plant and animal life, the aquatic world, and in the creatures that are so small we cannot even see them — has become greatly endangered in recent years. The reasons include the growing numbers of people who use natural resources, the disappearance of forests and other traditional treasure-houses of biodiversity, and the rapid increase in human-made pollution and climate change.

The AboutBiodiversity site comes in a number of sections, each of which examines a particular element of diversity. The first two sections, available now, are about Soil and about the Foods we eat. Coming soon are sections on endangered species, extinction, biodiversity and human health, the use of plant diversity in medicines, invasive species (those that take over the habitat of existing species), water, wetlands, climate change, ecosystems, the importance of museums in conserving biodiversity, the use of satellites and other remote-sensing devices to protect diversity, and more. Biodiversity is, after all, a subject that encompasses all of life.

Navigation.
The site has been designed so that you can move around it in several ways. Starting at the home page (index.html), you can jump to the top page of a section (such as Soil or Food), and then follow the links to succeeding pages. Those links are at the bottom of each page, starting with the word “Next. . .” Or you can use the random approach and skip around through each site. The page titled “Site Map” lists the name of each page in the section. Clicking on that name will take you to the list from any page in the section. There's another page, Anatomy of the site, that gives you a general outline of what's on the entire site..

A page titled Measurement provides a handy way to convert hectares to acres, pounds to kilograms, and the like. A page named Glossary serves as a mini-dictionary for some of the terms used on the site. Words and phrases in the pages that are defined in the Glossary appear in red, like this. That means you can hop over to the Glossary and scroll down to the word in question. You can easily return to your starting point by clicking the “Back” button on your browser.

Links to other pages appear in underlined color. Which color depends on how your browser is set, but often it is blue.

The site has been tested on several browsers, but there is always the chance that you’re using a version that doesn’t properly display the site’s content. The editor would appreciate hearing about such problems; he may be able to fix them.

Privacy.
This Web site does not ask for or collect personal information on the people who view it. For details of the site’s Privacy Policy, click here.

Lots of changes.
Because the Web is a constantly changing thing, occasionally a link to an external source (such as a site in Australia that has neat pictures of this or that creature — say a jackalope) may turn out to be faulty. One way to deal with this problem is to do a Web search (http://www.google.com is widely considered the best searching device) on a name or unique phrase connected with the faulty link. In the case cited here, you could type the words “Australia” and “jackalope” into the search box and hit the Enter button. (The jackalope is a mythical comic combination of a jackrabbit and antelope. The size and breadth of the Web are such, however, that if you do the search you'll be rewarded with dozens of “hits,” including a large collection of jackalope “photographs.”)

Like the Web itself, the AboutBiodiversity site is intended to be constantly changing. It may be worth your while to return to the site’s home page from time to time to check out what’s new. You can do this by clicking on the box that says — da-dah! — “What’s new.”

The AboutBiodiversity site is supported by the Bay and Paul Foundations of New York City. These foundations have a special commitment to biodiversity and conservation. They provide the Biodiversity Leadership Awards, which recognize scientists and others who do specially valuable work in studying, explaining, identifying, and conserving biological diversity. You can learn more about the foundations and their awards by going to http://www.bayandpaulfoundations.org.

This page last changed on 26-Jan-2004

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