Amphibian Species of the World 5.3, 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.

Amphibians on the IUCN Red List (formerly the Global Amphibian Assessment): http://www.iucnredlist.org/amphibians. An extraordinarily valuable website which provides maps drawn by regional experts for all species of amphibians as well as comprehensive information on conservation status.

AmphibiaWeb: http://www.amphibiaweb.org/. A website directed at the informed public that provides information amphibian conservation, population declines, as well as other general information about and images of many amphibian species. Useful for the nonprofessional user. The biology links (http://www.amphibiaweb.org/aw/resources/biology.html) are useful and the new-species-added page is very useful (http://amphibiaweb.org/amphibian/newspecies.html).

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 The contents and badly under construction and substantially out of date in most amphibian groups.

Encyclopedia of Life (Amphibia page): http://www.eol.org/pages/1552. Potentially an amazing resource, but currently far behind other websites, although within five years expect this site to be much more useful. The tie-in to the Biodiversity Heritage Library will make this site very useful for professionals. "Discover Life" is currently more useful.

Biodiversity Heritage Library: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/. A remarkable free online source of biodiversity publications that are out of copyright.

Discover Life Amphibia page: http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q?search=Amphibia. "Discover Life provides free on-line tools to identify species, share ways to teach and study nature's wonders, report findings, build maps, process images, and contribute to and learn from a growing encyclopedia of life that now has 1,283,886 species pages."

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

Mikkos Phylogeny Archive: http://www.helsinki.fi/~mhaaramo/metazoa/deuterostoma/chordata/amphibia/lissamphibia/lissamphibia.html. 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: ITIS Amphibia record. This is a United States Department of Agriculture system for storing information on all organismal names.

National Amphibian Atlas: http://igsaceeswb00.er.usgs.gov:8080/mapserver/naa/. 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 (January 2009) 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.