Encyclopedia of Life

Imagine an online site where you could look up all the important biological information for every species on earth. It is becoming reality right now. I invite you to take a look at an amazing project currently underway, the Enclyclopedia of Life. You can also read a four-page article on the project in the magazine On Earth.

The 2003 brainchild of Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, EOL got $12.5 million in foundation grants and debuted in February, 2008 with 30,000 species. It got 5 million hits the first day and crashed! It now has 170,000 species, about ten percent of the known and catalogued global taxonomy of approximately 1.8 million species. To continue work for the next ten years it may well take $100 million overall. The thing is, there are thought to be at least ten times that number of species (18 million) and when they finally get around to discovering and differentiating all the species of bacteria, some estimates are that the species list will run into the hundreds of millions.

The scale and scope of the EOL project are awe-inspiring. The system uses the Wikipedia model, but there is little reason to worry about hoax information on it. There are only some 6,000 qualified taxonomists in the world with the credentials to be allowed to submit data to the project. Yet people are currently scanning all the articles on biodiversity written before 1923. This is thought to amount to about 500 million pages of research.

The pages themselves are attractive, though. The basic pages include a picture of the species, its basic description, its Latin classification from kingdom down to species and links to the more specialized information you might be interested in. What is its geographic distribution? What does it eat and what eats it? Its ecological niche? Morphology? References in scientific literature? What current research projects are being done on it? It's a treasure trove for biologists and ecologists and students, for sure, but is interesting for regular lay people to peruse, too.

The Encyclopedia of Life is certainly the kind of project visionaries had in mind when they touted prospective uses for the new technology of the Internet. Take a look for yourself and wring your hands thinking about what we would have had to do find this kind of information for our high school or college term papers!