BioOne provides full-text access to both current and archival "bioscience research journals, featuring timely content on a wide-array of today’s most pressing topics, including global warming, stem cell research, ecological and biodiversity conservation."
ScienceDirect offers access to the publications of Elsevier Science and its subsidiaries - nearly 2,500 journals and 30,000 books. The collection contains selected full text of journal articles (since 1995) and book chapters. The collection focuses on science, technology and medicine, it also contains many journal titles from other social science disciplines.
Indexes articles on all aspects of medicine, published all over the world. Use for human biology, anatomy, and physiology, psychiatry, pharmacology, and health care management, administration, and policy. The MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) search is extremely helpful in finding terms. After you find an especially appropriate article, click on Related Records to find other articles of interest.
The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is the oldest and largest life science membership organization in the world. UST’s collection consists of14 full-text titles that are the most prominent publications in the field, delivering up-to-date and authoritative coverage of both basic and clinical microbiology.
Easy access to full-text science content including encyclopedias, reference books, periodicals, web sites, pictures, illustrations, audio clips and video clips. Includes ability to limit by lexile reading levels.
Animal Diversity Web (ADW) is an online database of animal natural history, distribution, classification, and conservation biology at the University of Michigan.
a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.9 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world.[2] It aims to build one "infinitely expandable" page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text.
A comprehensive catalogue of animal genome size data. Haploid DNA contents (C-values, in picograms) are currently available for 4972 species (3231 vertebrates and 1741 non-vertebrates) based on 6518 records from 669 published sources.
Getting Started
Good things to do before getting started:
Play the Name Game: know all of the names your species is known by (e.g. a barrel-eye fish is also known as "Macropinna microstoma," "spook fish," and sometimes is referred to just by its family name of "opisthoproctidae.")
Find a Family Tree: be clear on the classification of your species (where it is on its family tree) - this can eliminate a lot of confusion later down the road, and help you with determining how to search
Housekeeping: get set up on RefWorks so you can be sure to save what you are finding for future referrals
Things to think about...
Environmental Factors
Habitat(s)
Densities of individuals
Dangers upon throughout their lives and evasion techniques (predators?)
Food sources and capture strategies
Sheltering options (including camouflage)
Mate location, rituals, etc.
Biological Factors
Functionality of Internal Systems
Mechanical, physical, or biochemical
Adaptation
Transitions and what triggers them (e.g., migration, swarming, mating, etc.)
Life cycle (e.g., egg, nymph, flying form for dragonfly)
