Encyclopedia of Life launched

The Encyclopedia of Life project, which intends to eventually “serve as an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet,” was officially launched this month. The project is a collaboration between multiple institutions, including the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Smithsonian, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It’s also impressively funded with $10 million from the MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

There’s not much up on the site yet, but here’s a screenshot of one of their demonstration pages:

eolscreenshot1.jpg

Biologists Daniel Janzen (University of Pennsylvania) and E.O. Wilson (Harvard University) are credited with conceiving this project. I’ll try to talk to Dan Janzen this week because I’d love to get more deets on it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 12:43 am and is filed under News and reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Encyclopedia of Life launched”

  1. AS Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 12:08 pm

    I see a commenter at richarddawkins.net had the same idea I did:

    “I look forward to the announcement for the Encyclopedia of Creation, a rival project funded by creationist think-tanks to counter EOL’s liberal, evolutionist bias.”

    http://richarddawkins.net/article,1036,n,n

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