WASHINGTON — The first 30,000 pages of the online Encyclopedia of Life were unveiled Wednesday as part of an ambitious project to catalogue the 1.8 million species known on Earth.
In an immediate sign of its success, the Internet site www.eol.org was quickly swamped and inaccessible by midday.
The encyclopedia, which was launched in May 2007, provides free access to all current knowledge on the planet's biodiversity in a bid to help protect the environment from climate change and human over-exploitation.
It will take about a decade to complete the digital reference book which will eventually contain information on all living species documented over the past 250 years of scientific research.
And the Encyclopedia of Life will be constantly updated to include any new discoveries, or catalogue those species which become extinct.
The huge reference website has been made possible thanks to technological advances in search engines and online visualization techniques, the project coordinators said.
Eventually the encyclopedia might be broadened to include microscopic life.
But by grouping all 1.8 million known species it will prove a valuable tool for scientists researching all kinds of fields from disease transmission to protecting endangered animals, project director Jim Edwards said.
Welcome to the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life portal. This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth.
Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goals are to:
Create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.
Transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating virtually all known data about every living species.
Engage a wide audience of schoolchildren, educators, citizen scientists, academics and those who are just curious about Earth's species.
Increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.
In this first version of the portal, you will find:
About 25 exemplar species pages. These pages show the kind of rich environment, with extensive information, to which all the species pages will eventually grow. These pages have been authenticated (endorsed) by scientists.
Tens of thousands of additional species pages. These pages are authenticated, but do not contain the rich array of information found on the exemplar pages.
About 1 million minimal species pages contain the scientific and common names for a species and often have a distribution map, but lack other authenticated information.
We thank our many data partners who are making EOL possible by contributing their information.
SCIENTISTS are to release the first draft of an Encyclopedia of Life detailing everything known about all living organisms, from the aardvark to the zebu.
When complete the project will detail all 1.8m known plant and animal species. Each will have its own web page in an online archive that will include photographs, genetic information and distribution maps.
This week will see the release of the first 30,000 pages of the project, which will focus on fish, amphibia, large mammals and birds.
It is regarded by the scientists as a triumph but just a small percentage of the likely final total. “This is a great event,” said Lord Robert May, a former president of the Royal Society who is an adviser to the project. “It will help us to sort out all the different species and create a single consistent database.”
Scientists have long dreamt of creating a comprehensive encyclopedia listing all known life, but the volume of data accumulated over 250 years of research left everyone who tried it in despair.
However, the advent of Wikipedia and its revolutionary use of so-called “mash-up” software, to aggregate vast amounts of data from disparate sources, showed researchers how they could achieve their dream. The Natural History Museum (NHM) of London, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington are just three of the many centres pouring data into the encyclopedia. About 2.5m pages of ancient academic journals, drawings and photographs have been scanned into computers ready for publication.
One possibility is that the finished encyclopedia could also include links to video clips taken from television programmes. This weekend the project won the approval of Sir David Attenborough, the maker of programmes such as Life on Earth and the current Life in Cold Blood. “This is a hugely welcome project and long overdue,” he said.
The science of classifying the natural world began with Carl Linnaeus, who published his famous Systema Naturae in 1735. He had promised a classification of every known living thing but by the time he reached his 13th and final edition in 1770 and his original 11 pages had expanded to 3,000, it was still incomplete.
Since then scientists around the world have continued to catalogue and research individual species. But data and specimens were often left buried so deep in academic libraries and archives that they were inaccessible to most researchers.
Graham Higley, head of the NHM’s library and information services, organised the international conference that kick-started the Encyclopedia of Life project. He has been overseeing the scanning and digitisation of millions of pages of scientific records held at the museum.
“Identifying species correctly is critical. Cataloguing species and monitoring concentrations of known species or their appearance in new locations is vital, for example, to monitor the impact of climate change,” he said.
The Encyclopedia of Life is one of a number of initiatives aimed at recording every last detail of life on Earth. All are at least partly driven by the knowledge that many species could soon be sent into extinction by habitat destruction, climate change and exploitation. One scheme is the Frozen Ark project, also based partly at the NHM, which aims to store deep-frozen DNA from endangered animals. Kew Gardens is attempting a similar project to conserve the world’s plants in its millennium seed bank in West Sussex.
First pages of Encyclopedia of Life go online