I'm looking for people to help with a new wikipedia article/website

[Tommyknocker]

I'm thinking of making a website (best case scenario) or wikipedia article on the changing biodiversity since the ice age, due to intervention of humans. Obviously it is quite difficult to speculate why some of the earlier species dissapeared, for example the megafauna in North America and Australia. However the most common theories directly or indirectly point to the arrival of man. I'm sure articles could be found contradicting this, then more articles countering those.. but that's natural history for you. What can be certain is in the last 2,000 or 3,000 years, many hundreds of thousands of species have become extinct or had their range greatly reduced due to hunting/persecution, habitat destruction, introduction of foreign species and some other human-related factors. It would take an immense amount of time to mention all these, which is why I would be focusing on:

 

a) Vertabrates, or perhaps some large and in some way significant invertabrates.

b) More so mammals.

c) When in comes to a living species (which range has been greatly reduced), those which people can relate to the most and their is sufficient data to perhaps produce a map of the distribution change. Eg. gray wolf, tiger.

 

They will be organised according to continent and habitat, and will basically take the scenario of "If humans never existed, this is what there would be here". It should be completely scientific in approach but at the same time accessible to people which know little on the matter.

 

Here's the thing- I have no idea how to create a website, and am very trial and error when it comes to wikipedia. So someone which has knowledge in these areas would be most wlecome Also needed is research and perhaps someone who could create nice looking maps. My attempts on wikipedia shown below are accurate from what I can tell, but not very pretty. Not to mention they took hours and hours to even get to that state.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Original_distribution_of_wolf_subspecies.GIF

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Present_distribution_of_wolf_subspecies.gif

 

Please respond here, or pm if you think you can help!

[ecoli]

why don't you do it for http://www.wisci.org There are instructions there, and SFN could help you out.

 

PS- The maps look good to me

[Tommyknocker]

Thanks for the link, looks like a good place to start. How long has that thing been going?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

About four days.