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BioLib is an international encyclopedia of plants, fungi and animals.

Apart from taxonomic system you can visit our gallery, glossary, vernacular names dictionary, database of links and literature, systems of biotopes, discussion forum and several other functions related to biology.

It is a non-commercial educational project intended to be used both by experts and general public. Its content can be expanded by user contributions.

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News

2008-12-20 21:06:45

We redesigned the main page of BioLib. You'll find there an image of the day box and random tips on how to use BioLib more effectively, links to some important functions and - like before - brief statistics, news and history of changes.

We believe that the new main page is a change for the better and we can finally get rid of the two years old "news" haunting the previous version of main page.

2008-12-20 21:05:27

We've changed many things in last months. Functions for importing taxonomic citations, lots of changes in functions for adding taxa, scientific, vernacular names and images. Users can help us confirm the identifications of images in gallery and even unregistered users can propose determination changes.

Lot of time was spent working on a tool that will allow users to translate user interface of BioLib into other languages. While the tool is nearly finished, we're looking for people who will help us to test it and to translate some of the texts.

Users will be able to add new language definitions or even propose changes for existing texts, since we're quite sure that our English version is far from perfect. If you're interested to help, you can contact the main administrator.

News >>

Image of the day

Number of records

Taxa:1028056
Scientific names:1396188
Vernacular names:329926
Images:210250
Terms in glossary:4990

Explore BioLib

Tips - Tagging of photos of cultivated plants, reared animals and specimen collections

If you are uploading a photograph of a plant grown at home or in glasshouse or botanical garden please link the image with cultivated plant tag. Similarly, use tag reared animal for domestic animals or animals kept in zoo, and tag collection specimen for the image from collection of specimens of plants, fungi or animals.

Differentiation of such images from photos of freely occurring specimens is very important for correct identification of the species and it is also needed for automatical check whether the photographed specimen is found in checklist of country linked to the image - such controls will help us in the future to check the correctness of that determination or whether there are species missing in the checklists

More tips >>

Brief history of changes

Ondřej Zicha   [2012-09-01 18:49:12]

Adding image tags and associating images with colors

Registered users can now add glossary tags (such as male/female, larva, flower, leaf...) for any image in gallery. These tags are marked as unconfirmed and are revised and accepted by gallery administrators. Also it is possible to use special form for associating image with color tags.


Color tags will be used to filter gallery for single color or combination of colors, it is however necessary first to associate as many images with colors as possible.

Not only predominant color but also small spots of different color that could help determination of the species should be associated with the image. It is however not recommended to associate green color with leaves and unripe fruits, white for mushroom stalks, "transparent" for wings of most of the insects, black or brown for legs of beetles where elytra of different color is clearly visible and so on.
Ondřej Zicha   [2012-09-01 18:43:40]

Vernacular names linked to scientific synonyms

In cases where some common name is used only for taxon which is synonymized with different taxon in BioLib it is now possible to link this name to specific synonym, see for example Czech names for Entoloma
Ondřej Zicha   [2009-06-24 22:52:09]
- taxon profiles, search results, index of taxa, checklists and some other functions now allow filtering records by "kingdom" (not in strict taxonomic sense). Taxa are divided in five such groups - animals (blue), fungi (yellow), plants (green), "bacteria and other" (orange - Bacteria, Chromalveolata, Rhizaria, Excavata atp.) and viruses (gray).

- icons for taxa profiles containing images or texts are now also incorporated in several functions, such as search, index and so on

New records  |  Complete history of changes >>



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