The WAPITI pilot project was intended to be a federated network of dataservers in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. WAPITI's objective was to build a prototype system that meets the needs of the states individually that can also feed data interactively to a regional data gateway. The WAPITI project was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII, an initiative of the U.S. Geological Survey's Biological Resources Division). WAPITI was developed and is maintained by the Fish and Wildlife Information Exchange, a division of the Conservation Management Institute of Virginia Tech.

The goals of WAPITI were to serve taxonomy, distribution, status, and habitat distribution data of vertebrates and select invertebrates from the wildlife databases of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. Several webpages have been created to search for species by common or scientific names, taxonomic class, or ITIS taxon serial numbers (TSNs). A list of matching species' common and scientific names and links to the individual state data is returned. Users click on the appropriate link to view individual species data. Each species record contains links to metadata from the state servers so users can make educated decisions about appropriate use of the data. Crosswalks between each state's nomenclature and WAPITI standards standardize the data. This pilot project is currently not available online.