Find out what kind of birds live in your area, or what kind of fish can be found in the middle of the Atlantic, with the Map of Life.
Mapping Life
An ambitious project to map every living thing on Earth.
Web2Carz Senior Writer
Published: May 23rd, 2012
E
veryone loves a good map. There’s a reason Google Maps is one of that company’s best—and most successful—applications. And now, researchers are adding a cool new dimension to Google Maps with their Map of Life project. It isn’t roads, highways, and thoroughfares that are being plotted—it’s life. The Map of Life program lets you search the entire planet and see what kind of living things live where.
It’s an extremely ambitious project, and it’s far from complete. Eventually the project (which includes contributions from the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard, the Missouri Botanical Garden, NASA, and others) hopes to allow people to search plants, birds, fish, reptiles, and all other forms of life.
You can view the map here. Use the various filters to choose which species you want to see. Set the search radius and you can see what life can be found in any given location.
It’s still a work in progress, but it’s got plenty of information to keep you searching for a while.
