The first 30,000 pages of the online Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) were recently unveiled. The EOL seeks to catalog and describe in one location the estimated 1.8 million species of life on Earth. See an example record.
In addition to its strong potential for use in comparative biology and as a general taxonomic reference, The EOL will be a foundational resource for helping to conserve species already known and to identify millions of additional species that haven’t yet been described or named. At its core is the knowledge about the world’s species that has been discovered by scientists over the last 250 years. By putting this information all together in one place, EOL hopes to accelerate our understanding of the world’s remaining biodiversity.
