Biological Inventory Databases of the World's Protected Areas

The Information Center for the Environment (ICE), in cooperation with the United States Man and the Biosphere program (U.S. MAB), the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the National Biological Information Infrastructure, the U.S. National Park Service, and the Biological Resources Division of the U.S Geological Survey, has produced databases containing documented, taxonomically standardized species inventories of plants and animals reported from the world's protected areas.

This effort, originally the Biosphere Reserve Integrated Monitoring (or BRIM) program, was conceived in 1991, at the EuroMAB Congress in Strasbourg, France. Since then, regular updates and corrections to the databases have continued, and data from a large number of protected areas which are not part of the UNESCO network of Biosphere Reserves have been added. The databases available via the Internet continue to grow, both in terms of the numbers of records they contain and in the frequency with which these databases are accessed, and now represent the world's largest publicly-accessible repository of standardized, taxonomically harmonized, documented biological inventory data. The ICE databases are updated monthly.

In order to better discriminate between the BRIM database derived exclusively from sites which have been recognized by UNESCO as Biosphere Reserves, and the larger ICE Biological Inventory Database derived from a wide variety of protected areas and sources, ICE provides separate links from its Web Site: one for Biosphere Reserves; and another for all Protected Areas. Together, these databases provide access to all of the data from the world's protected areas.