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May 16, 2007
Researchers to compile Earth's 'book of life'
It will be called the "Encyclopedia of Life." And it is, as they say in Boston, wicked cool.Imagine a website where you can research, or just read about, every living thing on earth, from a microbe that lives next to an underwater volcano to a California redwood tree. A website where you can even add your knowledge of some life form or species.
Over the next 10 years, researchers vow to gather every scrap of information available about the planet's 1.8 million known species of animals, plants, and other organisms. And once the information is gathered, it will be available on the Internet entirely for free.
This project has been initiated by five top US universities and institutions of higher learning: Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.; The Field Museum in Chicago; the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Other scientific institutes, like The Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Garden in England, will make their vast collections of historic records available through the encyclopedia.
Wicked cool is how I would phrase it! Access to this kind of information in one place in a well organized fashion is definitely a world changing affair. I went through some of the entries on the website, it's definitely going to extremely useful for students and unfortunately for people like me a never ending rabbit hole of following relationships between species and their environments.
Of course, the cynic in me is always snarky when someone says they are going to include "every" organism on the planet, because what just a bit ago, they discovered hundreds of new sea creatures in the Antarctic Sea. I'd like to see a wee bit more scientific restrain in the public statements, because by the time reporters get a hold of something like this it's going to be blow completely out of proportion in their rabid attempts to sensationalize it to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Actually it's probably best never to put out anything other than prepared statements and give no interviews at all.
Read more over at Christian Science Monitor and the Encyclopedia of Life.
Posted by Jamison at May 16, 2007 4:19 PM
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