Thought this may be of interest:

http://www.conservationmaps.org/index.jsp

They've got some pretty heavyweight partners and sponsors and look to be well funded. What a terrible, inaccessible website though! The HTML is awful pre-2000 style stuff. The fact that such a potentially high-profile project is making such fundamental mistakes doesn't bode too well.

There's an article about the site here: http://www.esri.com/news/arcwatch/0507/feature.html