Amphibian Species of the World 5.1, an Online Reference

Useful links

Google: http://www.google.com/. The fastest way to locate information on any taxon is to search for it on Google.

Global Amphibian Assessment: http://www.globalamphibians.org. An extraordinarily valuable website which provides maps for all species of amphibians as well as comprehensive information on conservation status. The taxonomy used is substantially out of date.

AmphibiaWeb: http://www.amphibiaweb.org/. A website directed at the nonprofessional public that provides information amphibian conservation, population declines, as well as other general information about and images of many amphibian species. At the time of this writing AmphibiaWeb is substantially out of syncrony with the state of the taxonomic literature. The biology links (http://www.amphibiaweb.org/aw/resources/biology.html) are useful.

Tree of Life: http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Living_Amphibians&contgroup=Terrestrial_vertebrates. This site (not associated with the NSF Assembling-the-Tree-of-Life Program) provides a basic source of information regarding the evolutionary history for all major taxa of amphibians optimized on educational outreach. The contents are good for a general overview but badly “under construction†and substantially out of date.

The Center for North American Herpetology: http://www.cnah.org/index.asp. Joseph T. Collins' website, a good place to start to access much herpetological information, particularly with reference to the United States.

Mikko's Phylogeny Archive: http://www.fmnh.helsinki.fi/users/haaramo/Metazoa/Deuterostoma/Chordata/Amphibia/Lissamphibia/Lissamphibia.htm. This site provides quick access to a tree of relationships of amphibians to the level of genus with access to major literature sources, mostly relating to fossil groups which are not addressed by ASW.

ITIS. Integrated Taxonomic Information System: http://www.itis.usda.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=173420. This is a United States Department of Agriculture system for storing information on all organismal names.

ARMI National Atlas for Amphibian Distributions: http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/armiatlas/. This site contains reasonably good maps of the distributions of amphibians in the United States, although in some cases counties seem to be the unit of occurrence, and without accompanying text it is difficult to evaluate the sometimes significant differences between these maps and those in the more traditional field guides. The taxonomy at the time of this writing (December 2006) is substantially out of date.

Translations of the Scientific Names of the Reptiles and Amphibians and Amphibians of North America: http://ebeltz.net/herps/etymain.html. Lots of interesting and helpful biographical and etymological information on USA and Canadian amphibian and reptile names from the indefatigable Ellin Beltz.

Bibliomania Herplit Website: http://herplit.com/herplit/. Although not comprehensive, Breck Bartholomew's literature database is extraordinarily useful for those needing ready access to bibliographic citations.