What is Biodiversity?
All living things we know of are part of Earth's biodiversity, the diversity of life. The concept of biodiversity can be divided up into levels such as ecosystem diversity, species diversity, and genetic diversity; in these pages, we are restricting our view of biodiversity to species.
This project is sorted via classical systematics with levels such as kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. We have also created quick links to some of the more popular groups - microorganisms, fungi, plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Most of these groups do not share similar taxonomic rank, but are grouped solely to help the enthusiast navigate to them. From there we have done our best to classify the animals according to Linnean classification systems.
Browse some of our species
An Untamed Science Video about Biodiversity
How to Navigate the Biodiversity Portal.
The Untamed Science Biodiversity Portal is an ongoing work in progress designed specifically to be a fun place to learn about the world's biodiversity. While other sites, such as the Encyclopedia of Life are dedicated to being an all in one stop for biodiversity information, much of the pages are filled with technical information on the species. That is extremely important, but its not our main focus. Our focus is to tell the stories of each taxa, and each species. We're teaming up with scientists, filmmakers and popular science writers who can make the learning process fun. We have organized the site according to common organizational conventions. We understand that the exact taxonomy of individual organisms changes all the time so we have stuck to a somewhat traditional organizational method. Our site is intended to give a broad overview of the life on earth that is fun and informative, while also being accurate. We have several plant and animal experts that serve as both our authors and our editors. We encourage everyone to read up on the authors of the site, and volunteer to be one yourself if you want to help tell an individual specie's story.
Biodiversity Definition by Mary Poffenroth
Mary is one of our content writers. She is an adjunct professor at San Jose State who teaches classes on environmental science and biodiversity. She made this short video to help explain what biodiversity is.
Can I help add to these pages?
Yes! We need your help to make this a valuable resource for everyone, but we're not quite ready. If you feel that you are qualified to help add content whether as a passionate researcher, a dedicated teacher or a knowledgeable student, we want to know you exist. To keep the quality of the pages as high as possible we need to get to know content producers. Please send us an email via our contact form to let us know you're interested.
Currently we're working on our database management system to prepare our content advisers to start adding material. We'll be in contact with everyone once we've organized the site for you to become a content producer as well!
