MOL Blog

We have been so excited to see (and read about) all the interest in Map of Life since we launched our public beta in May 2012. Since launch, we’ve been quietly and industriously working on many new features and growing the data that Map of Life makes available. At the same time, we have been working hard to streamline and boost performance. A lot of this has been happening in the background, but we wanted to tell you a bit about a couple new features now live on the site and to also welcome some new folks to the team. To keep this short, you can learn all about new team members on our People page, but welcome Tom Auer (Yale), Peter Erb (CU Boulder) and Carsten Meyer (Georg-August-University of Göttingen).

Now onto the fun stuff. Our big news is that we have a much enhanced species list tool developed in the Jetz Lab. To try the new tool out, just go to our mapping tool, and right-click (or ctrl-click on Macs) on a spot on the globe, and you will get a list that includes tabs for images of species found at that spot, along with a chart showing percent of species at different levels of threat as defined by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List. You can also now download the list as a comma-delimited file. The other main feature is that now you auto-zoom to the broadest extent of layers when you hit “Map Selected Layers”.

More features and datasets are coming soon, so stay tuned! And please do send along feedback. Your suggestions and thoughts continue to inspire us.