ZipcodeZoo.com aspires to be a useful Field Guide to plants and animals of the world. Often, to be useful, a field guide must have a sense of where you are and what might be found there.

• For every professional naturalist who has made a positive identification of some species, there are 10,000 amateurs wondering what they have just seen. There are many books to assist in the task of identification, but most cover species of a wide geographic range -- "Birds of America" -- even though most species occur in smaller geographic ranges. If you are trying to identify something you have just seen, the grand book of everything is too much. Too much information can be cumbersome. For identification, a good field guide could be localized to your back yard.
• There are many species that look the same, and can be distinguished only by genetic analysis or by knowing where they were found. If your Field Guide contains many finches or salamanders that could not possibly be found in your back yard, it increases your chance of a misidentification. Too much information can sometimes mislead.

ZipcodeZoo.com is working toward being able to provide information about the animals of a specific area. We will succeed when you can make a list all species that might be found in any specific spot in the world, without strays that could not be found there. Ideally, such lists would be sensitive to the probability of being found in a given spot, not merely whether it might/might not be there. For migratory birds, such lists would be sensitive to the time of year as well. We have some listing capability here, but the quality of our species distribution data must still be improved.

We want to build an online field guide suited for the amateur naturalist. Here are highlights of what we have done so far:

• We've added information on 2,064,824 species from around the world. Zipcode Zoo is not just for Americans (and more than half our visitors don't live in the land of zipcodes.)
• We've added lots of photos – 209,345 photos taken by 1,699 photographers – because only with multiple photos can we clearly see differences between individuals of different age, sex, season, condition, and activity. Individuals of a species may differ in look from each other; these differences may be important in natural interactions, and absolutely need to be seen if the naturalist is to identify an observation correctly. Whereas the high cost of producing photos for books limits traditional texts to one or two photos per species, the Internet makes possible this unlimited use of photos.
• With photos, as with other information, we care about quality. We are blessed to have had so many contributors of high quality photos, and sometimes give awards for Photographer of the Month.
• We've been gathering field observations -- 28,694,723 so far -- and mapping them with the help of Google, to help you see exactly where a plant or animal has been reported.
• Finding just the right species in all of this can be like finding a needle in a haystack. A Proximity Lister and a Region Lister will help you find plants or animals in a geographic area of interest. PlantFinder offers 19 criteria to narrow your selection of plants. PlantFinder's database currently includes 1,047,813 attributes for 160,674 of the 1,005,882 plants on this site. BirdFinder uses location and 29,773 attributes for 880 birds.
• We've added popup definitions for 44,187 terms. For many terms such as "abdominal", the popup definition pronounces the term. Short definitions such as that for "entire" simply popup on mouse over, then go away. Other definitions, such as that for "abdominal" open in small windows.
• We've added Quiz to develop skill matching the bird, mammal, fish, or amphibian with the sounds it makes. Quiz also includes a dozen interactive crossword puzzles that will challenge and build your vocabulary.
• We added automatic inference of a visitor's location (from their IP address), and a means for a visitor to supply their correct location by clicking here.
• We've built localized lists of Invasives Near You and Threatened Near You to list local Invasives and threatened species.
• For locations in the U.S., the home page includes Places to Explore, which lists name, address, phone, and url of a variety of places of interest within 50 miles of your home. Places are listed by proximity to you, and include links to an area map and driving directions. Locations in the U.S. also have links to current weather info and to demographic info about the local area.
• We have Slideshows. View slideshows of favorite plants and animals, or of our favorite places, or of photos taken by our great photographers.
• We've given the naturalist an efficient way to record their observations with the LifeList button at the bottom of every species page.
• We've made a start at sorting through identifications with Key, a tool that helps you step through kingdom, phylum, class, order, and family to help you decide what species you have at hand.
• We've sought feedback. Every page provides a button to report a problem on the page, and pages with info on a plant or animal provide a button to allow you to suggest edits to that page.
• Our users come from around the world, so with a single click on a link at the bottom of any of 2,064,824 pages, you may read the page in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, or Spanish.

We have a secret motive: to supplement the diminished outdoor experiences of modern society. Adults everywhere seem to be less able to make time to hike and camp and explore. Kids have less time for soccer or the playground, and are increasingly being told that wandering in the woods is dangerous. Besides, in many areas the nearby woods is now a shopping center. We don't want ZipcodeZoo.com to be a substitute for getting outdoors, but if amateur naturalists are already indoors and at a computer, we want to be useful.

We can do better. In the next year, our efforts will include:

• More information for each species, particularly common species.
• Improved capability to create "flash cards" for your field trips. In the works now: a Butterfly Finder.
• Better writing. Amateur naturalists don't need to be patronized, but everyone deserves readable prose. Plants and animals are interesting. Information about them should be, too.
• More photos that are simply bigger and better. Plants and animals are beautiful. They deserve great photos.
• Better maps, with animation showing how populations migrate, or are changing over time.
• Data sharing with other organizations. We offer non-profit organizations the photos that we have taken for their own use in serving the plants and animals of the world.