When the American sociobiologist E. O. Wilson was awarded the TED Prize in 2007, he was given the opportunity to make a wish. His wish was that someone would fund and create a freely accessible online database of every known species, to give scientists "the tools that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity".
Within two months, Wilson's vision of a digital Noah's Ark won financial backing to the tune of $12.5 million from the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and today the Encyclopedia of Life is a reality. Text, images and videos can be uploaded by anyone who's interested, and content is vetted by expert curators.
The inventory has grown more quickly than anyone expected. To date, there are pages for more than 150,000 species, with contributions from 250 specialists and 1,200 "citizen scientists".
Members of the public have contributed more than 30,000 images via the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) group page on the photo-sharing website Flickr. Once the identity of the photographed species has been confirmed by an expert, the image is added to the main site.
By 2017, the site aims to have collated information on all 1.8 million recorded species. To help the project push on towards this goal, the founding sponsors today announced a further $12.5 million in funding.
"Creating a single portal to access a web page for each of the 1.8 million known species will provide a powerful tool to assist researchers and policymakers in better understanding biodiversity and discerning patterns of plant and animal behaviour," says Arthur Sussman, vice president of the MacArthur Foundation. "By integrating and consolidating information on species, EOL also has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and serve as an infrastructure for life sciences research."
One way in which the EOL could aid environmental efforts is in stemming the spread of invasive species such as Cameraria ohridella, a moth from the Balkans that is now inflicting damage on horse chestnut trees across Europe. By providing descriptions of such species and maps of their spread, conservationists hope that the EOL will help local authorities to tackle foreign pests quickly.
One of the most surprising applications of the endeavour is in research into human ageing. The Biology of Aging portal is a project that seeks to use EOL data to compare related animals with different lifespans in an attempt to identify genes and other factors that could hold the key to extending longevity.
A recent study of bats hints at the potential of this approach. There is a general trend that larger animals have longer lifespans, but curiously bats tend to live longer than rodents of a similar size. Biologists discovered that the long lifetimes of two bat species correlated with lower levels of protein damage compared with similar-sized mice, suggesting that preserving protein function might be a useful avenue for ageing research.
"Most species have not been studied in a medically relevant way," says Holly Miller, project director of the Biology of Aging portal. "EOL is simplifying such research by creating a handy reference for the scientific and common names of species, body size, age of reproduction, habitat, geographic location and temperature and more, all of which could be relevant to unravelling longevity's secrets."
If you've got photos, videos, or knowledge you'd like to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Life, click on the link. It might just add a year to your life.