With funding from the National Science Foundation's Course Curriculum and Lab Improvement program (award #0633095), the Animal Diversity Web team implemented an advanced search tool we call Quaardvark (in homage to aardvarks, exceptionally good diggers).

The structured data that make up the species accounts are available for research through this tool. Students use Quaardvark to investigate questions based on important principles in ecological and organismal biology. After specifying what animals they are interested in (the query) and what they want to know about those animals (the report), students are presented with data in a spreadsheet-like format. Students explore and analyze the data using familiar tools (such as Excel). This allows students to discover for themselves the patterns underlying important biological concepts through open-ended exploration of real data.

Quaardvark has been tested at five different institutions, and was well-received by students and faculty alike.

The Animal Diversity Web team obtained funding from the Encyclopedia of Life's Biodiversity Synthesis Center to host a workshop entitled "species-focused writing and web contributions to enhance undergraduate biology research skills and learning." From October 22 to 24, 2009, 23 participants met at the Field Museum in Chicago to discuss the wide variety of existing efforts to build databases of natural history information by leveraging the efforts of students. Participants included biologists and biology faculty, education researchers, and database technology specialists and included representatives from large biodiversity databases (EOL, ADW, AmphibiaWeb, INBIO) and a variety of national and international educational institutions.

The workshop highlighted perspectives from educators and education researchers on the value of species account writing in science education. The workshop went exceptionally well and much progress was made towards a best practices guide and publication on the value of species-account writing in science classrooms. The workshop made great progress towards establishing productive communication among the most active members of this community.

Please also see the EOL blog post about this workshop on the EOL blog.

ADW Photo contributor, Klaus Jost, publishes a Great White Shark Calendar:

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS92727+14-Oct-2009+PRN20091014

Taxon Tree, the graphic taxonomy visualization tool previously available through the Animal Diversity Web, is no longer available on the site. We continue to look into ways to coordinate ADW database and Taxon Tree development.

The Animal Diversity Web and University of Michigan's School of Education continue their collaboration developing and testing biodiversity curricula in Detroit Public Schools. The "DeepThink" project was funded by the National Science Foundation's Learning Progressions program. This project will develop, implement, and test an innovative set of curricula for 4th, 5th, and 6th grades with structured progression in both content and reasoning complexity.

The Animal Diversity Web received funding from the National Science Foundation's Course Curriculum and Lab Improvement program to develop, implement, and assess the use of our structured query tool for inquiry learning in a variety of undergraduate courses. This structured query tool permits complex queries to extract ADW natural history data, which can then be used to directly test hypotheses in organismal biology. The structured query tool, and exercises designed for it, will be tested in 5 undergraduate institutions in Fall 2007.