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BIODIVERSITY: A Web Page for Each of the World’s Creatures

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, May 10 2007 (IPS) - Scientists launched a global initiative Thursday called the “Encyclopedia of Life” that will document the Earth’s 1.8 million known species and track the impacts of habitat loss and climate change.

The ambitious electronic encyclopedia will catalogue the details of every species thus far identified and put all this information on the Internet so anyone can access it.

“This will be a fantastic resource for the developing world,” said James Edwards, the new executive director of the Encyclopedia of Life project headquartered in Washington at the Smithsonian Institution.

Until now, researchers and students from the South had to travel to the big 10 natural history museums located in the North to learn about species in their own countries, Edwards told IPS.

“I recently met three researchers from India who were spending a year at the Harvard University Herbaria to learn about their native plants,” he said. The Herbaria has five million plant specimens from around the world, comprising the eighth largest collection.

In a few years’ time, all that information and much more will be on the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) website.

“We will finally be able to get a big picture view of life on Earth and be able to see the changes through time, which will be a fantastic resource to monitor the impacts of climate change,” Edwards said.

Over the next 10 years, and at an estimated cost of 100 million dollars, the Encyclopedia of Life will create Internet pages for all 1.8 million species currently named. It will also expedite the classification of the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued. The pages will provide written information and, when available, photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information on each species.

The only country with something similar to the EoL is Mexico’s CONABIO biodiversity database, which has enabled Mexico to know where to look for impacts of climate change or invasive species, and where not to grow genetically engineered crops, among many other uses, Edwards said.

Ralph E. Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a U.S. organisation that contributed 2.5 million dollars, said, “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide the citizens of the world a ‘macroscope’ of almost unimaginable power to find and create understanding of biodiversity across the globe.”

The project also received 10 million dollars from the MacArthur Foundation.

“Our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is ever discovered,” renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson said recently.

Little is known about hundreds of thousands of species already collected, including insects, deep ocean species, fungi and plants. Millions more await discovery.

Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, has called this knowledge deficit “dangerous” and long wished for such an encyclopedia. “Today, the practicalities of making this encyclopedia real are within reach as never before,” he said.

In addition to collecting the world’s scientific data on biodiversity and organising it into a common format, EoL wants input from people around the globe. Scientists and the public, including birders, amateur naturalists, school children and others who can provide direct observations of changes, will be included in a separate section.

“We also hope to provide some computing resources to help groups create their own databases that will feed into the EoL,” said Edwards.

While the encyclopedia is similar to Wikipedia, the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet, the major difference is that all content will be vetted by scientists to make sure the data is authentic. It is not intended to compete with Wikipedia and will link to it, while Wikipedia will have many links to the EoL.

Although the pages will initially be available only in English, countries such as China, Mexico, Costa Rica and South Africa are looking at translating the content into local languages. Automated translators have also improved, assisted by dictionaries of biodiversity terms already published in different languages, Edwards said.

Scientific institutions around the world have agreed to open their data collections and Edwards says everything will be open-source and open-access. The first 1.5 million pages of the EoL have already been scanned from the scientific literature on biodiversity and sample pages have been posted.

“I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life,” concluded Edwards. “It is an ambitious project, but the time for this has come.”