Biodiversity Explorer is a website devoted to showing and explaining the diversity, biology and interactions of life on earth, particularly the life we have here in southern Africa (south of the Kuneni and Zambezi rivers). Our approach is to start with familiar organisms that we see or experience around us but which we know little about, and use them as a springboard to examining more unfamiliar topics. There is a huge body of scientific research that underpins our understanding of life on earth and the goal of Biodiversity Explorer is to draw on this research and present it in an understandable and integrated way.