Narrator:        This is Science Today. Thanks to a website developed and maintained by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, discovering information about the world's amphibians is just a mouse-click away.  AmphibiaWeb.org currently contains information on over 6,000 species, and more are coming in all the time.

Wake:              I received a photograph from a tour guide at a small nature preserve in Costa Rica. He had had a group of people out on an evening walk and had spotted arboreal salamanders up in the vegetation, and it appeared they were courting. And he took a photograph of it and sent it to me. I immediately recognized it as one of the rarest salamanders in the world.

Narrator:         Biologist David Wake started AmphibiaWeb as a student project back in 1999 but since then it has grown into a powerful tool for researchers, educators and the general public.

Wake:              It's also used extensively by agency people who are concerned with rare and endangered species or species ranges and that sort of thing.

Narrator:         For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.