Over the past 150 years, rapid growth in land use, industry and urban development has resulted in dramatic changes which pose significant threats for many organisms. Therefore, improving our knowledge about biodiversity, learning where species live and how to protect them, is one of the greatest challenges of this century.

As a major element of the world's terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity, ground beetles play an important role in maintaining the health of the Earth's biosphere. For example, they are the predominant invertebrates in certain types of habitats such as river sides and agricultural land. Many carnivorous members of this insect family are "farmer's best friends' in the natural control of pests, but limited data on these species undermine the ability to make progress in sustainable land use. Many species are vulnerable or threatened by factors including dramatic habitat loss, but lack of information hinders nations wishing to fulfil their obligations under the Convention of Biological Diversity. For example, governments of the world have set aside nature reserves and wildlife refuges but, in most cases, comprehensive inventories of the species that occur in those areas are lacking, and the full value of these protected areas in serving as conservation centers remains unknown.

Informations about ground beetles are stored in thousands of publications distributed over a wide range of periodicals, journals or books, and written in many languages.
The difficulties to track such information is a major impediment not only to scientific progress but also to the ability of researchers to contribute effectively to urgent conservation efforts. The CarabCat Citations database seeks to improve access to the fragmented bibliographical data and other information relating to each scientific name.

How to use: Search is optimized on accepted names of taxa as listed in the Catalogue of Life and the CarabCat Global Checklist. The geographic search is optimized on simple country codes (for a list of country codes and other instructions click here). Search results are generated in tables displaying the bibliographic references (micro-citations, i.e., authors' name and year); the page(s); the verbatim name that was used as the valid name by the author of the reference; and coded information of each work's thematic content. We will also make an attempt to track mistaken applications of names.
An updated edition of 'Bibliographia Carabidarum' is under preparation (example page).
The current focus of the CarabCat Citations database is on the Afrotropical fauna, but more content will continue to be added.

Faunistic work is tremendously labor-intensive, specifically for mapping the species distributions across a larger scale. These difficulties in acquiring important data are troublesome for researchers in the 'developed' world, but are especially daunting in many tropical regions where the highest number of species is living.
The purpose of CarabMap and the regional map for Africa (with current focus on genera Graphipterus and Piezia) is to reduce such impediments by interactive map tools which can create dynamic online grid maps and associated data tables generated at the moment of search. All these maps can be downloaded and used under the Creative Commons License (BY, version 4.0).

For details on how to use the map tools go here: world map / Africa map
Another regional mapping tool for central Europe (focus on Bavaria) can be found here