The List For Life
By Helen Potter
You are a scientist and you have $100 million - what do you do? Space mission? Cure for cancer? Or make an online encyclopaedia of every living species?That's the plan for the ambitious Encyclopaedia of Life, which aims to collect details of all 1.8 million known animal and plant species and store them in an online archive.
Each species will have its own page featuring photos, video, sound, maps and information written by experts. The archive will start with animals, plants and fungi, with microbes and possibly even fossils to follow.
"The Encyclopaedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time," said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the project. Great - next time I’m in a desperate hurry to find the full taxonomic classification of a brussel sprout, I’ll know where to look.
It is hoped that as the encyclopaedia develops it will provide a web of life, showing the relationships between different species. The archive will also allow scientists to identify species about which little is known and help to focus their efforts.
This team isn't the first to have the idea of cataloguing every living thing. However, previous attempts such as the Catalogue of Life (a list of names but lacking descriptions) and the Barcode of Life (an attempt to identify all species through a gene sequence found in mitochondria and proud collectors of 250,000 species so far) are lacking the sheer proposed scale and depth of the Encyclopaedia.
With an estimated 5-10 million species on the planet, there's a long way to go before we even know what they all are, let alone have them catalogued.
Image: Alvaro RG
For more from Helen, visit her page.And speaking of species...
- News - New species abound
- Spoof - Lemurs with style
- Straight - Animals that bite
- Spoof - Taxonomy of the mobile phone
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