Scientists put together the "Encyclopedia of Life"

A database accessible on the Internet will allow scientists to list all known details about 1.8 million species * The project is expected to last about a decade

 A long-nosed anteater will stand shoulder to shoulder with the zorilla in an ambitious plan to provide a snapshot of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to bring together the known details of all 1.8 million plant and animal species archived online.
Each species will get its own page that will contain pictures, video, sound and a distribution map, and it will be written by experts.
The archive, whose establishment will last ten years, will be able to assist in conservation efforts as well as serve as a useful tool for studies. "The Encyclopedia of Life will provide the essential information about biological diversity and conservation efforts to anyone, anywhere and at any time," says Dr. James Edwards, the director of the $100 million project.
"The encyclopedia will allow anyone to access high-quality, well-organized information and will be available in a way that has never been before.
 
The huge database will contain all the details about the animals, plants and fungi alive today, followed by the bacteria and eventually fossils of creatures that are no longer alive today. It is estimated that eventually the size of the encyclopedia will reach 100 million entries, as the number of different species.
For the purpose of starting, the information will first be gathered from existing databases such as the fish database FishBase, which already contains details on 29,900 species.

"One of the big tasks in the first six months of the project will be to identify which group will focus on which species," said Graham Higley of the Natural History Museum in London, one of the partners in the project. As the project grows, it will become the "web of life" and will also represent the connections between the different species on Earth. During the encyclopedia's long gestation, different teams of scientists will work to fill the gaps in this field. They will ask to identify species on which information is scarce, and it is a very large number of species - to fill it in and make it useful, Higley said.
In fact, work on the database has been under development since January 2006, although species-specific web pages have been produced ad hoc since the mid-XNUMXs.
The scientists involved in the project said that the ability to catalog millions of records on the Internet has only recently become available.
Developments in the field of search technology, interpretation, and visualization of information allow us - actually require us to build the encyclopedia of life, says Dr. Edwards.
"Eventually we will fill it with many more than the 1.8 million species we know today. Biologists estimate that the actual number of species inhabiting the earth is between 5 and 100 million species."

Projects have already been carried out in the past that tried to build indexes of life on Earth. For example, the catalog of life has a database of over a million species, but according to Higley, it does not reach the level of detail that the encyclopedia of life should reach. "This is a list of names," he said. "She does not describe these species at all". Several databases have been established to take the identification process one step further.
In 2005, the Barcode of Life Consortium was established, an ongoing effort to identify all species using a system of genetic markers. These "tags" will consist of sequences of DNA letters in a certain gene found in the mitochondria - the power units of the cells. As part of this project, over 250 such barcodes describing over 27 species were collected.

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