These Trial Species Home Pages are working drafts offered here for commentary. They are not to be viewed as "published". Please reply to <djanzen@sas.upenn.edu>
A "Species Home Page" is a proposed protocol for species-based biodiversity information distribution from a web site, information that
can be easily linked to other sources of biodiversity information,
is modular per species,
can be instantly restructured in any combination of its components (taxonomic, geographic, morphological, ecological, etc.), and
is publically available.
The stimulus for this development is the need for a standard web site format to present information about the species of organisms encountered in the inventory of a large complex wildland, in this case the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica. It is assumed that the equivalent of "Genus Home Page", "Family Home Page", multi-species identification tools, etc. will appear over time, interleaved with the Species Home Pages.
A Species Home Page is here visualized as a folder or directory on a www server containing at least the following kinds of information:
A. Species Page containing, as a dated and authored publication,
low DPI images of adults and immatures to allow identification, with explanatory text,
a statement about the known geographic distribution for the species, overall, within Costa Rica, and within the ACG (this may be a dot map),
a summary description of the organism's basic natural history,
a summary description of how to locate the organism within the ACG.
B. Folder or directory of high resolution images, viewed with JPEGView (Mac) or LView (PC), linked to the low resolution images or words in the html text of the Species Page or other documents in the Species Home Page.
C. In some cases, AdobeAcrobat or html versions of articles that have been published elsewhere about the larval biology of a species, but not yet available at a www URL.
D. In some cases, URLs for places where this species has another Home Page, other signficant species-based html documents, event-based databases.
To view the high resolution images linked to the Species Pages and the FMP 3.0 databases the reviewer will need to have JPEGView (Mac) or LView (PC), which can be obtained free of charge from <http://152.1.24.177/Teaching/manuscript/0600-0007.html> and <http://www.lview.com>.
In the draft Species Home Pages included here, the low resolution images have been scanned at 337-610 dpi while the high resolution images have been scanned at 2700 dpi. The high resolution images are accessed by clicking on the blue-framed low resolution images in the html documents; the high resolution compressed images are 200-600k and will require additional time to download. They open to become 5-20 megabyte images.
The text of these Species Home Pages has been generated directly in PageMill 2.0.
A Species Home Page may offer links to the individual records for that species in event-based databases (a "specimen-based database" is just a special case of an "event-based database").
A password for viewing an example of a Species Home Page linked by Tango to a FileMaker Pro 3.0 Event-Based Database may be obtained from <djanzen@sas.upenn.edu>
Comments or questions e-mail: djanzen@sas.upenn.edu
This page last reviewed November 22, 1996