Title: Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) let public upload images and information to massive interactive online database
More than 150,000 species pages populated with expert-verified text and images are now available on the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) at EOL.org. The EOL is a fast-growing inventory expected to shed new light on everything from conservation strategies for endangered species to climate change and the movements of disease-bearing or invasive pests. Experts and citizen scientists have contributed to the growth of the interactive encyclopedia, which dedicates a Web page to each known species and will eventually contain 1.8 million pages. Over 30,000 still images and video, as well as local information about changing biodiversity, have been uploaded to the Encyclopedia of Life via new tools that let the public contribute to a global online science collaboration of unprecedented scale. As the 10-year project marks its 2nd anniversary, EOL officials announced completion of over 75% of the encyclopedia's architecture, with 1.4 million placeholder pages now in place.
EOL is an online environment for presenting authoritative, well-organized species information, including DNA barcodes and other genetic sequences, from diverse global sources (content providers are listed at www.eol.org/content/partners), dramatically expanding its free availability to users everywhere. Contributors and users of what will be the ultimate online field guide are professional and citizen scientists, teachers, students, media, environmental managers, families and artists. Since EOL’s unveiling in early 2008, the site has attracted 1.8 million unique visitors from more than 200 countries.
Gray Mouse Lemur, Microcebus murinus, at Ranomafana, Madagascar. Photographed on 25 October 2005 Photo by Arthur Chapman from Flickr.
With EOL now fully open to receive information from both specialists and the public, some 250 experts, including taxonomists, conservation biologists, graduate students and others, along with more than 1,200 citizen scientists, have to date stepped forward to volunteer images, share data, or to write or curate pages.
EOL accounts are freely available and registered users can add comments or observations to a page or tag a species and search for its relatives.
Information submitted by the public, as well as images (via the photo sharing site Flickr, appear with a yellow background until authenticated by experts. Almost 40% of the 31,000 images so far have come from five photographers - from Portugal, Australia (2), Spain and Austria. The best of them, including winners of regular EOL photo contests, are showcased at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1056008@N20.
In order to better serve non-English speaking users, EOL partners are creating regional versions, with information and digitized literature in local languages. The first regional EOLs with a focus on local plants, animals and microorganisms have been initiated in the Netherlands, Australia and China, with discussions underway in Central America, the Arab world, Indonesia and South Africa.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the project's earliest supporters, announced on August 23, 2009 that it is contributing an additional grant of $10 million. "Creating a single portal to access a web page for each of the 1.8 million known species will provide a powerful tool to assist researchers and policymakers in better understanding biodiversity and discerning patterns of plant and animal behavior," says Arthur Sussman, MacArthur Vice President. "By integrating and consolidating information on species, EOL also has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and serve as an infrastructure for life sciences research."
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a founding sponsor, announced $2.5 million in additional funding. Jesse Ausubel, Vice-President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation said, "The idea of an Encyclopedia of Life now seems so natural that people cannot believe that the EOL does not already fully exist. Even with the magic of the Internet, lots of blood, sweat and tears stand between the more than 150,000 well-represented species and the future when 1.8 million species will gaze out at us from www.eol.org. The work of growing EOL is gratifying, and the progress is visible week to week."
Among other newly-added interactive features: an online widget that automatically inserts links to EOL species pages into a digitized document. EOL's "NameLink" tool identifies species names in a document and inserts an icon next to each that will take the reader to the relevant EOL species page.
EOL's Biodiversity Informatics Group, meanwhile, is beta testing "LifeDesks" - independent online environments to facilitate communication and collaboration between scientists or organized groups of amateurs as they assemble and edit images, text, source references and other species information for EOL pages.
In an initiative of the EOL Education Group, undergraduates at four universities, Harvard, Oregon State, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, are creating species pages under their professors' supervision. For example, students have prepared more than 100 fungi species pages, vetted by experts at MushroomObserver.org. Undergraduate student contributions to content partners Amphibia Web and Animal Diversity Web are also being served on EOL.
EOL has also launched a Fellows Program, oriented to postdoctoral students, graduate students and others who will contribute content from their own research and catalyze contributions from others in their scientific communities.
And at WhyReef, students can discover the marine life that lives in a virtual coral reef. Each species is linked to an EOL page with photos and descriptions of, for example, what eats what and other threats each may face. Students can also interact with scientists to ask questions.
"With new content and tools in place, EOL is open for business as never before. And we intend to harness the eyes and collective brainpower of hundreds of thousands of users to spot intriguing new information, share observations, and enhance EOL's role as a leading provider of accurate and relevant biodiversity information," says EOL Executive Director James Edwards who is based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
"Collecting all of Earth's species together in one place is an extremely ambitious undertaking, as only Noah knows," adds Dr. Edwards. “There are literally thousands of websites dedicated to individual aspects of biodiversity - to amphibians, plants or ants, for example, or to specific geographic areas. This unique collaboration between more than 100 leading international organizations is making vast amounts of information available in a common format, allowing users to more readily identify new species across different taxa and regions."
The information in this article was provided by EOL for release on August 23, 2009.
