Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Digital Library

For over half a century the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (ASDM) has enchanted millions of visitors with its exhibits of live animals in astonishingly natural settings, while intriguing and instructing them with fascinating educational programs. At the same time, the Museum has gained a worldwide reputation in the scientific community as an institution committed to researching and protecting the land, plants, and the animals of the Sonoran Desert region.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary federal agency responsible for supporting the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Learn more at http://www.imls.gov.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The ASDM Sonoran Desert Digital Library includes the plants, animals, minerals and biotic communities of the Sonoran Desert region. This region consists of the Sonoran Desert and all its contiguous biotic communities. The Sonoran Desert region extends from the Mogollon Rim in the north to the coastal tip of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, encompassing Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. It also reaches west to the Pacific Ocean, including both the Baja peninsula and the Gulf of California.

During the current Phase of development, the Digital Library is focusing on the plant, animal and mineral species that are physically present in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's collections. The Digital Library has already begun expanding its database and image catalog to include species from the Sonoran Desert region that are not included in the museum's collections. It is the goal of the ASDM Sonoran Desert Digital Library to present taxonomic information and images for all of the species from the Sonoran Desert region.

It should be noted that while the Sonoran Desert region possesses specimens of all of the natural mineral species present in the world, the Digital Library is limited to those mineral specimens in the museum's physical collection. This is because the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum cannot verify the original location of specimens not in our collection.

A biotic community is the collection of plants and animals living and interacting with each other and with their physical environment in a given locality, such as in a salt marsh or in a bursage-creosote community.

Fair Use

Images on the ASDM Digital Library are made available under the "Fair Use" provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. They may be used only for personal or educational use. For all other uses you must contact the copyright holder to request permission or pay a licensing fee. If you have any doubt whether your purposes comply with Fair Use, contact the copyright holder. All images must be credited with the copyright holder and the provider as below:

Other Uses

For any use other than personal or educational, contact the copyright holder to ask permission or seek a licensing agreement. Contact information may be found on the Photographer's page. If you are unable to locate contact information for a specific photographer, please contact the this project's Production Coordinator for assistance.

Yes. To contribute images, click the Sign In link on the left navigation bar. Read the instructions carefully and create a user name and password. You must be at least 18 years of age to contribute images to the ASDM Sonoran Desert Digital Library. Your images will be reviewed for quality, species identification and appropriateness. Images that do not meet our criteria will not be included in the Digital Library.

The ASDM Sonoran Desert Digital Library does not currently contain lesson plans, though it is anticipated that we will in the future. Teachers are encouraged to use the images, taxonomic data, and text for the species on this site in their own lessons. All materials must be appropriately credited, and used in accordance with the "Fair Use" provisions of U.S. Copyright law.

"Title of page or species name (remember that species' scientific names are always italicized)". ASDM Sonoran Desert Digital Library. Access date. <URL>.

For example:
"Puma concolor". ASDM Sonoran Desert Digital Library. 18 Aug 2007. <http://www.desertmuseumdigitallibrary.org/public/detail.php?id=ASDM02056>.

The Nomenclature pages allow users to navigate the taxonomic tree for all of the organisms in the Digital Library's database. For instance, users may begin with the Kingdom Animalia and browse the tree to find the four classes of vertebrates.

Users may also search for all of the images of species that share a common Family or Order. This shows the taxonomic level at which species like cats and dogs are related and what other animals they are similarly related to. This feature is useful for displaying images of loosely related species to study their physical morphologies (adaptations). For instance, the following diagram indicates that since cats branch off of Carnivora as a separate suborder, dogs are more closely related to bears with which they share a common suborder, Caniformia.

The nomenclature pages are accessible from every detail image page by clicking the scientific name under the image. Thus, users can see all of the taxonomic information for the species they are viewing.

Users may also search the nomenclature for partial words. This will return any taxonomic levels whose names are similar to the query. For instance, the query "lil" will yield: