…well, verterbrate life, so far. I’ve tried it for my region and it works well, except for reptiles and freshwater fish, which are currently only available for the US. Rebecca Boyle takes up the story:
This ambitious project, called the Map of Life, uses a Google Maps platform to map the known distribution of 30,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates. Many more are still being added, with the eventual goal of curating hundreds of thousands of plants, birds, fish, reptiles and everything else under the sun. Meanwhile, there’s still plenty to search. The project just opened to the public. “It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, who leads the project.It’s supported by NASA, international research institutions and the Encyclopedia of Life project, itself a monumental undertaking that aims to catalog all there is to know about every species on the planet.
Visit the MappingLife page and you’ll see a plain Google Maps view of Earth, which you can pan and zoom like any other. A series of filters lets you search by species, whose known distributions appear as points on the map. You can display records from specific study areas, like nature reserves or large regions. You can even see what species are located in the vicinity of any location on the planet — set the search radius and group of interest (birds, mammals, etc.) and right-click on any point of the map. A list appears with every species found in your radius.
http://www.mappinglife.org/