Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON)
From the about tab:
Researchers collect species occurrence data, records of an organism at a particular time in a particular place, as a primary or ancillary function of many biological field investigations. Presently, these data reside in numerous distributed systems and formats (including publications) and are consequently not being used to their full potential. As a step toward addressing this challenge, the Core Science Analytics and Synthesis (CSAS) program of the US Geological Survey (USGS) is developing Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON), an integrated and permanent resource for biological occurrence data from the United States.
BISON will leverage the accumulated human and infrastructural resources of the long-term USGS investment in research and information management and delivery.
If that sounds impressive, consider the BISON statistics as of December 31, 2013:
Total Records: 126,357,352
Georeferenced: 120,394,780
Taxa: 315,663
Data Providers: 307
Searches are by scientific or common name and ITIS enabled searching is on by default. Just in case you are curious:
BISON has integrated taxonomic information provided by the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) allowing advanced search capability in BISON. With the integration, BISON users have the ability to search more completely across species records. Searches can now include all synonyms and can be conducted hierarchically by genera and higher taxa levels using ITIS enabled queries. Binding taxonomic structure to search terms will make possible broad searches on species groups such as Salmonidae (salmon, trout, char) or Passeriformes (cardinals, tanagers, etc) as well as on all of the many synonyms and included taxa (there are 60 for Poa pratensis – Kentucky Bluegrass – alone).
Clue: With sixty (60) names, the breakfast of champions since 1875.
I wonder if Watson would have answered: “What is Kentucky Bluegrass?” on Jeopardy. The first Kentucky Derby was run on May 17, 1875.
BISON also offers developer tools and BISON Web Services.