Species 2000 is a non-profit ‘federation’ of global species, whose goal is to create a uniform and validated index to the world’s known species. Species 2000 China Node is a regional hub of Species 2000 program, and was launched in October 20, 2006. The Biodiversity Committee of Chinese Academy of Sciences (BC-CAS) cooperated with other partner organizations, such as Institute of Botany, Institute of Zoology, Institute of Microbiology, Institute of Oceanology of CAS supports and supervises the establishment and maintenance of the Species 2000 China Node.

The goal of the Species 2000 China Node project is to collect and verify the taxonomic information of all species distributed in China, provide a validated checklist, the Catalogue of Life China, to all users in the world. In the node, there are a Working Group and an IT Service Group. The Working Group is responsible for the integrated design and implementation of the project, which headed by Prof. Keping Ma. The IT Service Group provides the related IT technical support for the project and headed by Prof. Liqiang Ji.

The new website (www.sp2000.org.cn) is developed by the IT Service Group. The group rewrites software and uses Java to make sure the website could work well in cross-platforms. The website keeps the functions such as viewing taxonomy tree, searching for species, providing mirror database of the Global Catalogue of Life for users in both the Chinese and English interface. Furthermore, the website adds some new functions. Firstly, users could search for information specifically using scientific name, common name and distribution. Secondly, users could find vividly statistics information about annual checklists. Most importantly, register module is added, which allows the registered users to download data and give feedback. Besides, considering of a growing number of mobile phone users, the menu and pages are designed correspondingly.

The Species 2000 China Node will continue to improve the database and website features to provide better data service for users around the world.