Acknowledgments
This portal exists because of work done by many people over more than a century, most of it published in places that are hard to find and harder to compile. What follows records where the material came from and who paid for the compiling.
Funding
Research underpinning this portal is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award No. 2047939, held at the Cave Bio Lab at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Hosting, domain registration, design, and day to day maintenance are provided by Niemiller Nature LLC, a family business in Madison, Alabama. No public funds are used for site infrastructure.
Data sources
Records are compiled from the sources below. Each remains the property of its publisher and is subject to their terms; where you reuse material, cite the original rather than this portal.
- NatureServe
- Global and subnational conservation ranks, rank reasons, and threat assessments, through NatureServe Explorer and its member natural heritage programs.
- IUCN Red List
- Red List categories, criteria, assessors, and assessment dates.
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
- Federal listing status, listing dates, and proposed listings, through the Environmental Conservation Online System.
- GBIF
- Museum specimen records, drawn from 21,942 catalog entries published by the collections named on each account.
- GenBank
- 6,065 published nucleotide sequences, deposited by the researchers credited in each record.
- Catalogue of Life, ITIS, WoRMS
- Taxonomic backbone and accepted names.
- iNaturalist, Wikidata, Encyclopedia of Life
- Cross-references and identifiers linking accounts to the wider biodiversity graph.
- U.S. Census Bureau
- County boundaries and FIPS codes used to standardize distribution records.
Collections
Specimen records come from more than a hundred institutions. The collections holding material for a species are named on its account, and the full record list is available to download there.
Curators and collection managers who digitized this material, often without dedicated funding, made the specimen side of this portal possible.
People
Species accounts are written and reviewed by named contributors, who hold authorship of their text and are credited on each account with their ORCID where they have one.
The generations of biospeleologists whose descriptions, surveys, and revisions this portal compiles are cited in the references on each account. The work is theirs; the compilation is ours.
Silhouette illustrations are by Denise Niemiller, traced from specimens. The banner illustration is by Niemiller Nature LLC.
Citing the portal
Individual accounts carry their own citation, authors, and version. See Citation and Licensing for the full guidance.