Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times 24 Feb 08;
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.
"Encyclopedia of Life" Takes Shape: 30,000 Species
Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 26 Feb 08;
OSLO - About 30,000 species of creatures and plants have been listed in a draft "Encyclopedia of Life" that may aid understanding of issues from human ageing to disease, scientists said on Monday.
The free Internet encyclopedia (www.eol.org) aims to eventually list all 1.8 million known species of life in a $100 million, 10-year project begun in 2007.
The first draft, with 25 fully completed entries including text, pictures and video, is due to be launched at a conference in Monterey, California, on Wednesday. A further 30,000 have less detailed information.
"Our major message to the world is 'Here's our first attempt at putting together this encyclopedia, please give us our feedback, your criticisms, your comments'," James Edwards, executive director of the project, told Reuters.
Edward Wilson, a Harvard biologist whose call for a portrait of life in a 2003 speech helped spur creation of the encyclopedia, said: "This thing is taking off like a big booster rocket. ... It is already galvanising research."
The encyclopedia has been dubbed a "macroscope" -- helping to identify big patterns often overseen by scientists working in narrow fields.
Researchers into human ageing, for instance, often study a small range of creatures such as fruit flies or worms in laboratories to try to untangle why organisms age.
"We'd like to look across a group of organisms, a family of flies, for example, for the extremes," said Edwards.
Flies with unusually short or long life cycles could be compared to classic laboratory fruit flies for molecular or genetic clues to ageing. Such information across similar species is not now readily available.
LOW-COST, EFFICIENT
Or a developing country facing an outbreak of a new mosquito-borne disease or an invasion of crop-eating beetles could consult the encyclopedia to uncover breeding and feeding habits of the insects to work out ways to stop them.
"I'd hope that within 12 months we'll start to see papers written that could not have been done without the existence of the Encyclopedia of Life," said Jesse Ausubel, chairman of the project at the Rockefeller University in New York City.
He said scientists might, for instance, study hundreds of thousands of species to test Cope's Rule, which states that creatures tend to get bigger over geological time. Horses are an example -- their ancestors were dog-sized.
"The Encyclopedia of Life allows the low-cost efficient assembly of lots of databases that individual researchers would never be able to get together," he told Reuters.
He likened the current lack of an encyclopedia to trying to study a language without a dictionary. "The very fact of assembling all these species is a revolution," he said.
The project is led by the US Field Museum, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library -- a group that includes London's Natural History Museum, the New York Botanical Garden and the Royal Botanic Garden in Kew, England.
(Editing by Mary Gabriel)
