Interactive map plots locations of more than 100 million species

The United States Geological Society (USGS) has launched an online database and map that keeps track of more than 100 million different species and where they live within the United States,

Biodiversity Serving Our Nation, or BISON (a backronym if ever there was one), contains location-specific records of where living species are within the US. Its data comes from hundreds of different organisations and thousands of scientists, making it the most comprehensive map of American biodiversity ever made.

Anyone can search by scientific or common name of any living species (plant or animal), and can look to see what lives within any specific geographic area they want by drawing a perimeter—so, for example, searching to see exactly which forests in Virginia have been infected with a tree fungus.

All the results give a breakdown of the data (in map and list form), with information relating to where the data came from and how it was collected. BISON is hosted on servers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which are often used for large data processing like this. Not only are the locations of each species displayed, but up to 50 different environmental factors are also noted for each location to give a full ecological picture of everywhere within the US.

The idea is that it creates a unified source of information for everyone who needs to know the ecological status of a parcel of land. According to the USGS, that means "land managers, researchers, refuge managers, citizen scientists, agriculture professionals, fisheries managers, water resource managers, educators, and more." Altogether there are 110,233,486 individual species records on BISON's database.

It forms the American government's node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a worldwide effort to make biodiversity data as free and open as possible as a way of encouraging sustainable development.

The UK is a part of that network, too. Most of Western Europe and the Americas, and Australia and New Zealand, is involved, but African and Asian countries are sadly lacking in enthusiasm thus far.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.