Statistics and Facts
Statistics and Facts 1 1 The Animal Diversity Web is an extraordinarily rich, multimedia natural history database with a high profile among educators and general audiences. We currently have **2,150 accounts of animal species** online and **350 accounts of higher taxonomic groups**. We also present **11,500 images** and **725 animal sounds**. We will add another 250 species in the next two months. Our site architecture is explicitly designed to permit rapid and virtually unlimited expansion.
We serve **200,000 pages of content to ~10,000 IP addresses** every day. We know from comments and questions we receive that we are heavily used by high school and college students and their instructors, and also by the general public, ranging from 3rd graders to grandparents. At least 15% of the content we serve each month goes outside the U.S. to over 100 countries. Because the site is relatively old (first pages up in 1995) many other educational sites have linked to us, and we are highly ranked by the popular Google search engine, with ADW being the first result for many searches on animal names. People searching for information about natural history often come to us first, giving us a remarkable opportunity to influence the way they think about biodiversity.
Undergraduate students throughout North America create species accounts as part of coursework. We have collaborated with **30 colleges and universities** in creating new content, and recruit new participants each year. It is this model of recruiting hundreds or potentially thousands of authors that gives us the potential for remarkable growth and ultimately, coverage of the animal kingdom. Using our tools, course instructors provide feedback to students and do the initial editing of accounts. Accounts are then submitted to ADW and, if they are of sufficient quality, are edited and published on the site. Specialists write the accounts for higher groups; these accounts are also evaluated and edited by ADW staff before publication. Account writers are guided through the process by a highly structured template that is provided with detailed help text. The end result of student research and ADW editing is a set of searchable natural history data for individual animal species. structured-text