Hello everyone, I'm creating a zoo animal database with all the species from (hopefully) all North American zoos. I have access to a few public species lists but if anyone has any private species lists that they wouldn't mind sharing, please send them to me! Thanks!
I have posted several full species lists to various zoos within the United States forum over the past few years.
This has been talked about a fair few times on the forum (see this thread: Zoo Inventory for North America (American Zootierliste)? for more info). I don't want to discourage you, but most agree it is not possible to compile an up-to-date, reliable database for American zoos for a number of reasons. 1. The zoos themselves don't want such a database to be publicly available - in fact this was the reason ZIMS is no longer publicly visible (a few American zoos kicked up a fuss about their collections being online). 2. It is much more difficult to get inventories from American zoos than in Europe, since the former are generally more secretive about what they do and don't hold, particularly off-show holdings. 3. It would definitely require a coordinated effort by many different Zoochatters based around the continent to get it up and running and then updated. 4. It would probably need some sort of website to be constructed to hold all the information - a word or excel document is not good enough for such large quantities of data. 5. Many of the largest zoos on the continent do not have species lists published on the site and so you'd be limited to what else is available online. In conclusion, I wish you luck if you are truly committed to it but from my perspective at the very least it seems as if it will just be a neverending time sink unfortunately.
Hey dude, I too have started the database, and I am currently sorting them by type (i.e, carnivora, primate, artiodactyla).
