Partners and Contributors

The Animal Diversity Web has enjoyed generous support from many sources throughout the years. This funding has been critical in developing this valuable encyclopedia of animal natural history. The following is a list of our funding sources.

University of Michigan has provided funds via the Museum of Zoology, Information Technology Services, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

The Marisla Foundation (formerly the Homeland Foundation) supported us with a grant from 1998 to 2000.

A grant from National Science Foundation’s IERI program, BioKIDS: Kids Inquiry of Diverse Species (NSF: DRL 0089283, 2001-2005) supported our collaboration with the OneSky team, including Dr. Nancy Songer, at the University of Michigan School of Education, the LeTUS program, and NatureMapping. This collaborative work was continued with the DeepThink: Thinking Deeply about Biodiversity and Ecology project (NSF: DRL 0628151, 2006-2009).

We collaborated on efforts to visualize biodiversity information with the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at University of Maryland on a product called TaxonTree.

We received support from NSF to build and test our query tool with our Exploring Natural History: Promoting Active Learning in Ecology and Biodiversity project (NSF DUE 0633095, 2007-2009). We continued this work, including expanded research on student and instructor experiences and the creation of a library of activities applicable in a wide variety of undergraduate organismal biology courses in our Discovering Patterns in the Natural World through Student Inquiry in Ecology and Biodiversity project (NSF DUE 1122742, 2011 to 2014).

We continued our productive collaboration with Dr. Nancy Songer at the University of Michigan School of Education. In this new effort we worked with Dr. Songer’s research group, the Center for Essential Science, and with the Lifemapper group at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute to design and test a set of middle and high school curriculum modules. In these modules, students explore the impact of climate change on species and ecosystems. The project is called ChangeThinking for Global Science: Fostering and Evaluating Inquiry Thinking about the Ecological Impacts of Climate Change (NSF DRL 0918590, 2009-2013).

ADW organized and led a meeting of 21 influential biology education and database projects to explore how to more effectively bring data inquiry activities into undergraduate classrooms. The Enhancing Data Discovery and Usability for Inquiry in Biology Education project was funded under the Research Collaboration Network - Undergraduate Biology Education program (NSF DBI 1247821).

ADW partnered with Dr. Sharon Jansa and Dr. Rob Voss to create comprehensive information on South American didelphid marsupials: Opossum Phylogenetics: A Window on South America’s Splendid Diversity (NSF subcontract to University of Minnesota, 2011 to 2014).

Members of the ADW Team were selected for NSF I-Corps entrepreneurial training in order to help us find ways to generate revenues to sustain the ADW project into the future (NSF IIP 1340371).

Registered OAI repository (March 2005)