Access All The World’s Life Online At The Biodiversity Heritage Library

This incredible online collection of information is intended to improve research methodologies for scientists, visual artists, historians, and writers — but seriously, anyone anywhere can access this massive digital library — FREE!

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Natursystem aller bekannten inund ausländischen Insekten Berlin, J. Pauli, 1783–1804. (Translation: Natural system of all known domestic and foreign insects Berlin, J. Pauli, 1783–1804.) (Public domain, Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.)

The world recently stopped and gazed in awe at the magnificent photographs sent back to Earth from the new $10 billion Webb Telescope. Thanks to this technological marvel, all of us can now gaze upon planets and stars and galaxies that we have never seen before, and that none of us will never visit.

But there is a strange and beautiful world that we can visit and, conveniently, it’s the one we’re living on right now. Earth. However, anyone who wishes to explore life on Earth and to catch a brief glimpse of its complexities should get moving before it’s all disappeared. Due to global climate change as well as runaway habitat loss and other factors, the widespread loss of biodiversity is happening faster than any one human can catalogue. Further, most of the information about biodiversity is available in a very few books archived in a handful of libraries around the world. How can we access this material? How can we research what we do not even know exists?