Zoo Inventory for North America (American Zootierliste)?

Coelacanth18

Coelacanth18

Well-Known Member
10+ year member
Premium Member
So I'm sure this question has been posed and discussed before (I'd be shocked if it hasn't been) but why has nobody started an American zoo animal inventory? Europe has Zootierliste, the accuracy of which may be debatable, and we also have a dedicated community of zoo enthusiasts here in NA but no similar database. I'm sure that with the vast knowledge and abilities of the American & Canadian members on this site, we could create a very comprehensive and up-to-date inventory for people to peruse.

The site could also provide general information about the history of different species in North American captivity, how their population has been doing in recent years, numbers held in Europe and other world regions for comparison, and what recommendations the AZA has made for their management. All the kind of juicy raw information that we love.

To Chlidonias, if they read this thread: I did take a look at your thread about online databases. Global Species has a lot of information for NA zoos, but its information has only been updated through 2011. While it is a usable substitute, its information will only get increasingly outdated with time. However, if this inventory/database that I'm suggesting actually does exist, I would love to hear about it.
 
I too wonder why nobody has bothered to do this. Global Species is pretty useless because it is so out of date (and not completely accurate even when it was current); the only reason it is on my thread is because that is all that is available for most places outside Europe.

North America has nothing like the number of zoos in Europe, and there are numerous resident members with the kind of pedantic mind-set who could pull it off. It wouldn't need to start out as a full-blown "all the zoos in North America"; start with what you have and go from there.

My main recommendation would be to only have a select group of trustworthy editors and any edits have to be passed through them to check for accuracy. A big issue (in my eyes) with Zootierliste is that it appears anybody can become an editor and change the listings no matter how little they know.
 
This post by a ZTL administrator here might be helpful:
http://www.zoochat.com/25/zootierliste-440460/#post942506

I would imagine the same challenges that ZTL faces in adding American collections would also present themselves to any American version of a zoo database. Another issue is that, for whatever ridiculous reasons, some American zoos don't want their species lists out in the public because they fear that people will use them as "shopping lists" to steal animals. Personally I find that notion a little silly, especially considering that still applies to species on-exhibit...

If someone were to make a zoo database for American/North American collections, I would more than happy to help add and edit it as I take notes on everything I see/everything new I see (for repeat visits) when I visit a collection.

~Thylo:cool:
 
Chlidonias said:
I too wonder why nobody has bothered to do this. Global Species is pretty useless because it is so out of date (and not completely accurate even when it was current); the only reason it is on my thread is because that is all that is available for most places outside Europe.

North America has nothing like the number of zoos in Europe, and there are numerous resident members with the kind of pedantic mind-set who could pull it off. It wouldn't need to start out as a full-blown "all the zoos in North America"; start with what you have and go from there.

My main recommendation would be to only have a select group of trustworthy editors and any edits have to be passed through them to check for accuracy. A big issue (in my eyes) with Zootierliste is that it appears anybody can become an editor and change the listings no matter how little they know.
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Thanks for the information on Global Species. I figured it had quite a few inaccuracies, but I wanted to acknowledge it since it was there.

I agree wholeheartedly with that recommendation. Whether we wait to include species before they are confirmed to be there or whether we go ahead and include them until someone confirms its wrong, I feel like there will be about the same number of inaccuracies: low, but present.

I would be willing to help spearhead this project if anyone is interested in getting involved. Don't know much about website creation and design, though, so I would have to do quite a bit of research before I'd be comfortable handling the technical aspect.
 
ThylacineAlive said:
This post by a ZTL administrator here might be helpful:
http://www.zoochat.com/25/zootierliste-440460/#post942506

I would imagine the same challenges that ZTL faces in adding American collections would also present themselves to any American version of a zoo database. Another issue is that, for whatever ridiculous reasons, some American zoos don't want their species lists out in the public because they fear that people will use them as "shopping lists" to steal animals. Personally I find that notion a little silly, especially considering that still applies to species on-exhibit...

If someone were to make a zoo database for American/North American collections, I would more than happy to help add and edit it as I take notes on everything I see/everything new I see (for repeat visits) when I visit a collection.
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there can be no legal issues around publishing lists of animals held in public zoos - the animals are visible to anybody who comes through the gate, and even for off-display animals there would be no legal grounds for them to deny their existence. The only issue would be around private collections not open to the public (which probably shouldn't be included on the site anyway). I think what Eagle was saying is that for Zootierliste they make use of the inventories released by the zoos which are not always meant for public examination.

There would still be the same sort of mistakes as seen in Zootierliste, due to human error and how regularly/infrequently collections can be visited and updated, but a lot of the wrong listings (as opposed to delayed listings) could be avoided by having only a few editors who knew what they were doing.

The only thing stopping an American version is people sitting around saying "I wish someone would do this" instead of getting together and actually doing it. You need someone familiar enough with technology to create and maintain the site, people willing to pay to keep it running, and your group of data collectors.
 
Chlidonias said:
You need someone familiar enough with technology to create and maintain the site, people willing to pay to keep it running, and your group of data collectors.
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This is a question from a non-business or computer-oriented person, but why does it need to be funded? You don't have to pay for the website to exist, do you? And the editors could be volunteer, although the task of a small group of people managing the site may be too much of a commitment to ask for. But I feel like collections don't change their species often enough for that to be a problem.

Glad to here that both of you are on board! I was expecting a very melancholic "this is why it could never work" type of answer. I agree, I think if one person or a group of people take the initiative on it, they could get it set up and running with few problems.
 
Coelacanth18 said:
This is a question from a non-business or computer-oriented person, but why does it need to be funded? You don't have to pay for the website to exist, do you? And the editors could be volunteer, although the task of a small group of people managing the site may be too much of a commitment to ask for. But I feel like collections don't change their species often enough for that to be a problem.
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no, websites aren't "free". There are a number of costs involved - they aren't necessarily high but they are continuous. You can get free web-hosting sites but you would not be getting the sort of site you need and are at the mercy of the host company (e.g. if they have downtime then so does your site, if they go under then your site simply disappears, etc).

The editors would have to be volunteer, unless you want to be paying them out of your own pocket of course. As for commitment, zoo collections change all the time and you're looking at several hundred collections once you've got them all listed. And of course the amount of start-up work getting them all there in the first place is going to be pretty huge.
 
Coelacanth18 said:
And the editors could be volunteer, although the task of a small group of people managing the site may be too much of a commitment to ask for. But I feel like collections don't change their species often enough for that to be a problem.

Glad to here that both of you are on board! I was expecting a very melancholic "this is why it could never work" type of answer. I agree, I think if one person or a group of people take the initiative on it, they could get it set up and running with few problems.
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As Chlidonias mentioned earlier, you'd need to be very careful who you'd allow to edit the site as it's not hard for people to quickly ruin a good listing. From talking with certain UK ZooChatters, there are a good number of UK collections whose listing are completely wrong and continuously remain wrong due to ZTL allowing the wrong group of volunteers to edit it. Without naming names or offending anyone, personally I wouldn't trust a large number of the American members on this site to accurately edit a zoo database. You'd need to be very, very selective of who you'd allow to edit, which could create problems of its own. You'd also still always have mistakes, many of which link directly to Chlidonias' other point, zoos do often change their collections. Despite having a pretty strong list of what the Bronx Zoo keeps/kept, they often swap many species (particularly small birds and reptiles) between on and off-show as well as swap animals around the zoo. This makes it difficult to know what has left or has simply gone off-exhibit, especially if the animals remain off-exhibit for years at a time. Without inventories, this information would be quite difficult to know.

It could definitely work, but it'd certainly require careful and hard work from all involved and financial backing (which might be the main deterrent for people interesting in starting it).

~Thylo:cool:
 
Ok, thanks to both of you for clarifying. I was unaware of the necessary costs associated with running a website. Just the tip of my ignorance iceberg. *shrug* It's good to know that it's definitely possible, but paying for the site could very well be discouraging.

Do you think that we could get a group of ZooChatters to begin organizing this? I'm not sure that I'm really in a place to pay the full annual costs of the site, but I can look into it and decide that more certainly. If this really is a doable project, I would love to see it happen and not just be discussed before falling by the wayside. And of course, I would need a better gauge of how many people are actually interested.
 
ThylacineAlive said:
You'd also still always have mistakes, many of which link directly to Chlidonias' other point, zoos do often change their collections. Despite having a pretty strong list of what the Bronx Zoo keeps/kept, they often swap many species (particularly small birds and reptiles) between on and off-show as well as swap animals around the zoo. This makes it difficult to know what has left or has simply gone off-exhibit, especially if the animals remain off-exhibit for years at a time. Without inventories, this information would be quite difficult to know.
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the obvious and easy way around that is to put a footnote on that species saying something like "went off-display in 2014; may or may not still be present"
 
I've been thinking about building a site like zootierliste for US and Canada for some time. I do have a background in software development though I haven't been doing any hands on development for over 10 years now so if I work on this there will definitely be a learning curve. Unfortunately (having a full time job and two very young children) I cannot promise quick results, but think that if I start working on this now, I can get the first functional release go live by the end of the summer or early fall. Since it sounds that people are interested, I am very tempted to try:)
I don't have any experience in hosting non-government website so have no clue how much the hosting fees will be. I'll look into that and see if I will need any help with fund raising:)
I also think that the site would also require some kind of legal copyright and rules of behavior language (similar to zootierliste), and since I don't want to plagiarize what zootierliste has I may be looking for something equivalent.
As already mentioned on the thread, the biggest challenge here would be making sure that the data is accurate, since the database will only be as good as the data it houses. While I'd welcome an opportunity to travel more and visit various collections in order to verify the accuracy of the data, it is not realistic at this point. At best I can only confirm the listings of a few local zoos (I live in Baltimore MD)
 
Don't hold your breath :p American collections are a lot more loathe to allow the general public to know precisely what they hold when compared to European collections, both now and in the past. As a result, there are a lot fewer inventories and stocklists available with which to construct such a website, even if there were enough people willing to contribute who knew what they were talking about - which there are not, given how massive North America is when compared to Europe.

In other words, there is neither the evidence nor the manpower for ZTL to expand to cover North America.
 
We could probably start with major cities and work our way down. It'd probably be really hard though, especially with big zoos like San Diego and the Bronx
 
boro745 said:
Ich denke, es gibt momentan keine, ich würde es aber lieben : p(bitte, jemand korrigiert mich, wenn ich falsch ;)liege)
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Is there a option that we make a ZTL here.
For big Zoos in the US, e.g. Bronx Zoo, San Diego, Columbus, Cleveland, San Antonio etc., for Birds and Mammals.

Und sorry, mein Englisch ist nicht sehr gut
 
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