I don’t know if anyone remembers the website Fauna Europaea? They had a brilliant website that allowed people to view a free online database of the scientific names and distributions of all living multicellular land and fresh-water animals in Europe. This was an incredible resource to have and very easy to use.
I used to visit this website many years ago as I found it extremely useful, however the website eventually went down and I wasn’t able to find it anymore. At the time I didn’t end up looking into what happened, websites go down sometimes that’s just a fact of life on the internet.
Many years later however I still find myself wishing that website was still around. I did some googling today and read that Fauna Europaea were warned by the German Federal Office for Information Security for “significant security issues“ on their website. I managed to find out from the Fauna Europaea Facebook page that they ended up taking down their first website and making a new second website to replace it. The link to the second website they provided doesn’t work though and their Facebook page seems to be dead and still receives occasional comments to this day from people asking about the website and trying to contact Fauna Europaea. The page seemingly hasn’t been active since 2017.
Does anyone know what happened to Fauna Europaea after they created their second website? Does anyone know if Fauna Europaea will ever make a new website? It’s a real shame to know we’ve lost such a brilliant resource and it has effectively vanished without any explanation to why.