ABSTRACT
The United States National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is a collaborative program with the mission of improving online access to the country’s information about its biological resources. Coordinated by the Biological Informatics Program Office of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the NBII provides a distributed infrastructure for scientific information provided by national, state and local governments, universities, museums, private organizations, and international collaborations. Concentrating on the fields of biodiversity and ecology, the NBII’s main audience is considered U.S. land managers, scientists, and policy makers, but specific programs also support educators as well as private citizens. The NBII catalogs and links to data and information resources, provides searches of Web sites, develops tools for the integration and display of data, and synthesizes the latest information on select subjects; it also supports the development and use of standards and technological tools. The NBII is the only organization within the United States with the mandate and experience to organize and deliver the depth and breadth of biological information to the people.
