~ Early Web Links ~

Plants For A Future (PFAF) is a searchable database of over 8,000 plants catalogued by their edible, medicinal, and other practical uses, making it an essential reference for permaculture enthusiasts and herbalists alike. The site covers topics ranging from food forests and carbon farming to rare and unusual perennial plants, with browsable indexes and habitat guides built up over decades by a UK-registered charity.

Created by David Ulansey, this long-running reference site compiles hundreds of links to authoritative scientific reports documenting the ongoing sixth mass extinction and global biodiversity crisis. Active since 1998 and last updated in 2021, it covers species loss across vertebrates, insects, plants, and freshwater animals, drawing on sources like the IUCN, UN, WWF, and major scientific journals.

Bogleech is Jonathan Wojcik's long-running labor of love covering creature design reviews, bizarre biology, weird fiction, and year-round Halloween horror since 2001. Visitors will find deep-dive reviews of Pokemon and Digimon monsters, original tabletop RPG content including the Mortasheen bestiary, Halloween finds, and a sprawling archive of creature-focused writing spanning decades.

The Reptile Database, maintained by Peter Uetz and Jiří Hošek since 1995, is a comprehensive scientific reference cataloging all known reptile species including lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodiles, tuataras, and amphisbaenians. With advanced search tools, downloadable data, and regularly updated species counts backed by a team of volunteer editors, it serves as a definitive taxonomic resource for herpetologists and enthusiasts alike.

Bert Hubert's long-running article explains DNA biology through the lens of a computer programmer, drawing analogies between genetic code and software concepts like error correction, compression, and the halting problem. Originally written in 2001 and revised multiple times since, it became popular enough to spawn a two-hour conference presentation and an upcoming book.

The Kentucky Paleontological Society maintains this hub for fossil enthusiasts in the Bluegrass State, featuring field trip reports, taxonomic fossil photo galleries, and an impressive library of digitized historical geology texts dating back to the 1860s. From Ordovician trilobites to tetrapod trackways, the site covers Kentucky's rich fossil record with resources for both amateur collectors and researchers.

ITIS is the official Integrated Taxonomic Information System, a partnership between U.S. federal agencies and global specialists providing authoritative scientific names and taxonomic classifications for plants, animals, fungi, and microbes worldwide. Researchers and biodiversity professionals can search by common name, scientific name, or TSN identifier, access hierarchical taxonomic reports, and download the full database for integration into their own projects.

The Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria is a collaborative portal uniting 60 regional herbaria across Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and the Yukon, offering access to over 3.6 million plant specimen records and nearly 1.8 million images. Researchers and naturalists can search the database by label data or geographic location, download datasets for offline use, and consult a fully annotated checklist of vascular plants native to the Pacific Northwest.

Rod Crawford's Spider Collector's Journal chronicles decades of arachnid collecting expeditions from 1986 through the present, including trips to the Russian Kuril Islands and Sakhalin Island. The site features year-by-year narrative accounts, photo albums, and detailed documentation of tools and techniques used in scientific spider collection.

Thomas J. Elpel's plant identification hub teaches visitors to recognize wildflowers, weeds, and edible plants by learning the patterns of plant families rather than memorizing individual species. The site complements his book 'Botany in a Day' and includes slideshows, weed ecology, foraging guides, mushroom information, and online classes.