Mark A. MacAllister, Chatham County Schools, PO Box 128, 369 West Street, Pittsboro, NC 27312, USA; Jennifer Gilbreath, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, PO Box 1969, Manteo, NC 27954, USA; Francis X. Nolan, North Carolina Zoological Park, 4401 Zoo Parkway, Asheboro, NC 27203, USA

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the North Carolina Zoological Park, Chatham County Schools, and several other educational organizations have developed a website that brings information about the red wolf and the red wolf recovery project in North Carolina's Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to the world's classrooms. "The Red Wolves of Alligator River" (http://www.nczooredwolf.org/) includes online articles about red wolves, a library of lesson plans for K-12 classrooms, a photograph and art gallery, a calendar of wolf-related events, and links to other wolf-related resources. It also includes several highly interactive tools that allow students to communicate directly with USFWS and NCZP field personnel, and to share information and opinions between their classrooms.

The site debuts publicly in early October 1999, and will be expanded over the course of the 1999-2000 school year to include audio and video clips from the field, GIS mapping functions, examples of student work, and other learning resources. An electronic newsletter and two companion websites (one focused on teaching with the site, the other on the non-wolf flora and fauna of the Alligator River region) will also be part of the project. Overall, the goal of "The Red Wolves of Alligator River" is to share the natural history of this unique species with the rest of the world, to inform others about the efforts to protect it, and to address more generally the myriad issues that arise with endangered species protection.

Last year, a comparable project entitled "The Elephants of Cameroon" (a joint effort between World Wildlife Fund, the North Carolina Zoological Park, and Chatham County Schools) was visited by classrooms in all fifty states and in eighty foreign countries. It also gathered a variety of awards for excellence in educational website design. We look forward to the opportunity to share "The Red Wolves of Alligator River" with conference attendees; more importantly, we plan to discuss our experiences in bringing the various institutions together, in defining the philosophy and content of the site, and in bringing the site online. In short, we intend to present a "how-to" for other organizations that may be interested in completing an equivalent project.