The New York Times
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: February 26, 2008
The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required
http://www.eol.org/
Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page
descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the
blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster
mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a
bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the
book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be
ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate
there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.
An Online Catalog of Biodiversity It sounds surreal, and yet scientists
are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are
building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). On
Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will
introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict,
they will have the other 1.77 million.
While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that
the world’s scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the
pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can
hold as much information as scientists can upload. “It’s going to have
everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go
along,” said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the
Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman.
Other experts not involved in the project hail it as tremendously
promising. “I certainly think it is a great idea,” said Jody Hey, a
biologist at Rutgers University.
Yet a number of researchers wonder if it will reach its final goal. The
encyclopedia is not the first attempt to catalog every species on the
planet, and previous efforts have failed. “I have seen 20 years of good
ideas go nowhere,” said Daniel Brooks, a University of Toronto biologist.
Dr. Wilson has been involved with some of those failed attempts. But in
the past few years major advances in databases have made the goal more
realistic. Today biologists can consult databases that hold DNA
sequences from hundreds of thousands of species, for example. There are
also more detailed databases about groups of species, like mammals,
fungi and parasites. In 2003, Dr. Wilson wrote a paper in which he
called for all that information to be available in one place.
He and his colleagues then persuaded the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation to contribute money to a consortium of
universities, museums and scientific institutions. The Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation and some of the partners are adding money as well. The
encyclopedia will have a budget of about $50 million in its first five
years.
When Dr. Wilson and his colleagues announced the start of the
Encyclopedia of Life last May, their site was little more than a few
mocked-up pages. Behind the scenes, designers at the Marine Biological
Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., were busy building a system for getting
scientific information online fast.
“If we had sat down at a blank screen and started to write, word by
word, preparing the encyclopedia would have been virtually impossible,”
said James Edwards, the project’s executive director.
The designers wrote software that could automatically draw information —
maps, DNA sequences, bird songs, photographs, evolutionary trees, and so
on — from many sources and organize them in one place in one standard
format. Ten of the biggest natural history libraries in the world are
scanning millions of pages of scientific literature, which computers are
text-mining to add more information to species pages.
“The actual development has astonished me,” Dr. Wilson said. “I thought
we’d be talking about it and pushing it for a long time.”
The version of the encyclopedia to be introduced Thursday is far from
the finished product, Dr. Edwards warned. “It’s going to be rough,” he
said. “We’re releasing early to get feedback from people.”
The 30,000 species in the first version will come mainly from databases
of fish, amphibians and plants. Experts also created 24 detailed
“exemplar” pages, to show just how much information the encyclopedia can
handle. Those pages include well-studied species like the yellow fever
mosquito, the eastern white pine and the death-cap mushroom.
The researchers wanted to make the site useful to scientists and
nonscientists, so they created a sliding button that readers can move to
choose how much detail they want. They are also developing ways of
manipulating the information to make it useful in many ways.
“You’ll be able to download a personalized field guide,” Dr. Edwards
said. “You can say, ‘I’m going to go to this preserve in Thailand — what
do we know about what might be there?’ ”
Scientists, meanwhile, will be able to use the Encyclopedia of Life to
do original research. One team of scientists is already planning to
compare how different species grow old in order to understand the
biology of aging.
Experts on biodiversity are generally excited about the site. “The
Encyclopedia of Life is a fantastic and long overdue project,” said
Quentin D. Wheeler, the director of the International Institute for
Species Exploration at Arizona State University. But, he said, “my
concern is about the content, and where the content will come from.”
The ranks of taxonomists — the scientists who describe species and
revise old descriptions — have been shrinking steadily for decades.
“We have not given enough thought to the people who provide the
information on which the Encyclopedia of Life is built,” Dr. Edwards
acknowledged. “We are looking into ways to keep that community going.”
Dr. Wilson hopes the Encyclopedia of Life will foster the growth of that
group. For the past 60 years, he has been studying ants, and in May he
and other ant experts will be meeting at Harvard to plan how they can
take advantage of the Encyclopedia of Life.
The goal he would like them to set would be to add all 14,000 known
species of ants to the encyclopedia, and then add all the unknown ones —
perhaps an additional 15,000 to 25,000 species. “It’s going to be a fun
adventure for the next few decades,” Dr. Wilson said.
Fonte: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26ency.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin
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