wild
places | wild happenings | wild
news
make a difference for our wild places
home | links | search the site
make a difference for our wild places
home | links | search the site
|
wild
places | wild happenings | wild
news
make a difference for our wild places home | links | search the site |
| all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews |
|
wild
news on wildsingapore
|
| PlanetArk
10 May 07 Internet Encyclopedia to List All 1.8 Mln Species Story by Alister Doyle National Geographic 9 May 07 "Encyclopedia of Life" to Catalog All Species on Earth John Roach BBC 9 May 07 Scientists compile 'book of life' Yahoo News 8 May 07 Scientists work on Encyclopedia of Life By Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer Yahoo News 8 May 07 Website to catalog 1.8 million known living creatures by Jean-Louis Santini Scientists from around the world plan to collaborate on a free website aimed at providing information on all 1.8 million known species of animals, plants, and other living creatures on the planet. The Encyclopedia of Life project, to be officially launched on Wednesday, will provide over the next 10 years written information on each species. When available, the site will also offer photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information. The site "will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time," said James Edwards, a biologist picked to head the project. "Through collaboration, we all can increase our appreciation of the immense variety of life, the challenges to it, and ways to conserve biodiversity," he said. Edwards told AFP he hopes the Encyclopedia of Life will have the same catalytic effect the Human Genome Project has had on biology. "Making the information about the genetic sequences of organisms public has . . . revolutionized the way we do molecular biology and genetics," he said. Gathering information about the world's species, their ecology and their behavior on one site "should have an equally catalytic effect on other parts of society," he said. The site would be "useful for policy makers and managing biological diversities," as well as educators, school children, and even gardeners interested in their favorite flowers. It will be "an educational tool for everyone," he said. Site visitors, for example, will be able to learn how the geographical range of a particular species changes over the years due to the effects of global warming. "You can model possible future changes base upon different climate scenario, land use scenarios, etc." said Edwards. There are currently online encyclopedias that cover certain groups of living creatures, such as fish and amphibians. But the information is presented in different ways, while the Encyclopedia of Life would present the information in a common format, Edwards said. The project was initiated by several US organizations, including Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Institution. The effort is funded by 12.5 million dollars in grants from the MacArthur and Sloan foundations. Some 1.25 million pages of information have already been scanned in, Edwards said. Such an ambitious website is possible only due to recent technological advances, especially in visualization and internet search engines, Edwards said. "Even five years ago, we could not create such a resource," he said. Other partners include two British institutions, the Natural History Museum the Royal Botanic Gardens, and talks are underway for the scientists with the Atlas of Living Australia to join. Researchers from other nations around the world are cooperating closely with the project, Edwards said. Yahoo News 8 May 07 Scientists work on Encyclopedia of Life By Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer In a whale-sized project, the world's scientists plan to compile everything they know about all of Earth's 1.8 million known species and put it all on one Web site, open to everyone. The effort, called the Encyclopedia of Life, will include species descriptions, pictures, maps, videos, sound, sightings by amateurs, and links to entire genomes and scientific journal papers. Its first pages of information will be shown Wednesday in Washington where the massive effort is being announced by some of the world's leading scientific institutions and universities. The project will take about 10 years to complete. "It's an interactive zoo," said James Edwards, who will be the encyclopedia's executive director. Edwards currently helps run a global biodiversity information system. If the new encyclopedia progresses as planned, it should fill about 300 million pages, which, if lined up end-to-end, would be more than 52,000 miles long, able to stretch twice around the world at the equator. The MacArthur and Sloan foundations have given a total $12.5 million to pay for the first 2 1/2 years of the massive effort, but it will be free and accessible to everyone. The pages can be adjusted so that they provide useful information for both a schoolchild and a research biologist alike, with an emphasis on encouraging "citizen-scientists" to add their sightings. While amateurs can contribute in clearly marked side pages, the key detail and science parts of the encyclopedia will be compiled and reviewed by experts. "It could be a very big leap in the way we do science," said Cristian Samper, acting secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, one of seven museums, universities and labs to launch the encyclopedia. "This is a project that is so big, not even the Smithsonian, could do it by itself. It is a global effort." Other institutions helping head the undertaking include Harvard University, Chicago's Field Museum, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, the Biodiversity Heritage Library Consortium, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Atlas of Living Australia. The project will try to be like Mexico's Conabio compilation of all 70,000 named species in that country, but bigger, Edwards said. "They are going to do something extremely ambitious and important," said Conabio's founding director Jorge Soberon, now a professor at the University of Kansas. For more than a decade scientists have tried to compile simply a list of all species on Earth, but failed. It's been too complicated, too expensive and too cumbersome. This effort may succeed where the others have faltered because of new search engine technology — the same kind that Google uses. It will scan the Web for scientific information on the Internet and "mash up" all of the material into a file that then gets reviewed by expert curators, said Harvard's James Hanken, a steering committee member. For scientists, especially those in developing countries, this can open up new worlds of research, said Samper, who has worked as a biologist in Colombia studying South American plants. And that means more science from different areas, he said. Research papers that used to limited to northern science libraries will be easily accessible in remote Botswana, he said. "The democracy of science can't be overemphasized," he added. And the democracy will be spread to people without PhDs. Edwards said the public will be able to send information to scientists that they wouldn't have otherwise. "The public can contribute, and that makes a big difference," Soberon said. "It's one thing to be a passive spectator and another when the public can contribute." This could be crucial in tracking invasive species, Samper said. Sample demonstration pages of the polar bear show what the scientists hope to do. It offers pictures, maps, research and data on the molecular biology, genetics, reproduction diet of the polar bear. The information can be accessed at the "novice" level, which says: "Polar bears inhabit Arctic sea ice, water, islands and continental coastlines." At "expert" level, it says: Polar bears occur in low numbers throughout their range and are most abundant in shallow water areas near shore or where current or upwellings increase biological productivity near ice areas associated with open water, polynyas or lead systems." And as new species are discovered each day, they'll be added, scientists say. They estimate that Earth actually has 8 million species or so, but only one-quarter of them have been identified and named as separate species. After that, long-gone species — the fossil world — will be added. "If we don't include dinosaurs, we'll have lost 6-year-old boys," Edwards said. BBC 9 May 07 Scientists compile 'book of life' Long-snouted aardvarks will rub shoulders with skunk-like zorillas in an ambitious plan to provide a virtual snapshot of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive. Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts. The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education. "The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time," said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project. "[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level." Web advances The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added. To begin with, information will be harvested from existing databases, such as FishBase which already contains details of 29,900 species. "One of the big tasks in the first six months will be to identify which groups we will focus on after that," Graham Higley of London's Natural History Museum, one of the partners in the project, told the BBC News website. As the archive grows, it will become a "web of life" that will represent the relationships between different species on Earth. During this gestation, teams of scientists will pore over it. "They will be looking to identify species where the information is thin - and it is on an awful lot of species - to make it more comprehensive and usable," said Mr Higley. The database has been in development since January 2006, although web pages dedicated to individual species have been produced ad hoc since the mid 1990s. The scientists involved in the project said that the ability to catalogue millions of entries on the web had only just become possible. "Advances in technology for searching, annotating, and visualising information now permit us - indeed mandate us - to build the Encyclopedia of Life," said Dr Edwards. It could eventually fill with many more species than the original 1.8 million known today. Biologists estimate that there could be anywhere between five and 100 million species on the planet. Animal tags Other projects have previously attempted to index life on Earth. For example, the Catalogue of Life keeps a database of more than one million species. However, according to Mr Higley, it does not have the level of detail that the proposed Encyclopedia of Life will eventually contain. "It's a list of names," he said. "What it is not is a description of those species." Other databases have taken the identification process one step further. In 2005, scientists launched the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, an ongoing attempt to identify all species through a unique genetic marker system. These "tags" are composed of the order of DNA letters in a particular gene found in mitochondria, the "power units" in cells. The project has so far collected more than 250,000 barcodes and has described more than 27,000 species. National Geographic 9 May 07 "Encyclopedia of Life" to Catalog All Species on Earth John Roach for National Geographic News Scientists announced plans today to put descriptions, pictures, video, and sounds of the world's estimated 1.8 million named species on the Internet for free. The effort, called the Encyclopedia of Life, will standardize the presentation of "information about the plants and animals and microorganisms that share this planet with us," said James Edwards, the project's executive director. The information will be accessible to scientists, policymakers, educators, and the general public, who have all clamored for the encyclopedia for years, Edwards said. Peter Raven is president of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, which is participating in the project. He said information about species today is widely scattered in scientific literature, museum collections, and databases. "No one can really get it together in an edited form and know what's going on, and without that, there's no hope of using it for all the purposes where it could be applied," he said. (Raven chairs the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.) Scientists hope to use the Web-based encyclopedia to spur conservation efforts and expedite the cataloging of recently discovered species. The nonprofit project is expected to take about ten years and is being supported with 12.5 million U.S. dollars in grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Mash-Up The encyclopedia will be assembled using aggregation, or "mash-up," technology, which draws on information from different sources and integrates it into a single experience, Edwards said. For the project, agents will collect all the information about a particular species from the Web and assemble it into a draft species page. Scientists will then review, edit, and authenticate the information. A species expert will sign each page. "We think providing a place where you get a known quantity--where you know that what you're looking for or [what] you're getting relates to organisms and is also authoritative information--will be a big boon for tons of people," Edwards said. For example, the encyclopedia will provide information on species names, conservation status, and where the organisms currently reside. Project participants are particularly excited about the potential for the encyclopedia to aid the conservation of known species. Raven said the collected, organized species information can "point the way to solid information about what they are and where they are and, by doing that, help indicate the most effective steps that can be taken to deal with them in any way or conserve them." Since the encyclopedia will be Web-based, Edwards added, the species information will be able to be updated regularly, which will allow people to see how species respond to changes over time, like whether populations are expanding or decreasing. The encyclopedia will also help focus efforts to discover and catalog the estimated ten million species--not counting bacteria--that await scientific recognition. Verifying that a species is indeed unknown and distinct from its relatives is the most arduous task of describing a new species, Edwards noted, especially for people in developing countries who lack access to libraries. "Digitizing this information, making it freely available on the Web, will really enable these scientists in developing countries to be able to make descriptions of new species," he said. "And we know it's the developing world--it's in the tropical parts of the world--that most of the still-to-be-discovered species probably reside." PlanetArk 10 May 07 Internet Encyclopedia to List All 1.8 Mln Species Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent GERMANY: May 10, 2007 BONN, Germany - From apples to zebras, all 1.8 million known plant and animal species will be listed in an Internet-based "Encyclopedia of Life" under a US$100 million project, scientists said on Tuesday. The 10-year scheme, launched with initial grants of US$12.5 million from two US-based foundations, could aid everyone from children with biology homework to governments planning how to protect endangered species. "The Encyclopedia of Life plans to create an entry for every named species," James Edwards, executive director of the project which is backed by many leading research institutions, told Reuters. "At the moment that's 1.8 million." The free Encyclopedia would focus mainly on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow, blending text, photographs, maps and videos in a common format for each. Expansion of the Internet in recent years made the multi-media project possible. Demonstration pages at http://www.eol.org include entries about polar bears, rice, death cap mushrooms and a "yeti crab" with hairy claws recently found in the South Pacific. "This is about giving access to information to everyone," Jesse Ausubel, chairman of the project who works at the Rockefeller University in New York City, told Reuters. The Encyclopedia would draw on existing databases such as for mammals, fishes, birds, amphibians and plants. English would be used at the start with translations to other languages. Edwards said the project would give an overview of life on earth via what he termed a "macroscope" -- the opposite of a microscope through which scientists usually peer. Species would be added as they were identified. Edwards said there might be 8-10 million on earth, adding that estimates ranged from 5-100 million. Fossil species may also be added. The encyclopedia, to be run by a team of about 25-35 people, could help chart threats to species from pollution, habitat destruction and global warming. The project would be 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. Initial funding comes from a US$10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and US$2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Extra funds would be raised in coming years. Ausubel noted that 2007 was the 300th anniversary of the birth of Sweden's Carl Linnaeus, influential in working out ways to classify species. "If he were alive today we think he'd be jumping up and down celebrating," he said. links Encyclopedia of Life: http://www.eol.org/ Related articles on Global issues: biodiversity loss |
| News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes. | |
website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com |