What do you get when five museums, universities and labs come together to bring 1.8 million known living things and make it publicly available on a website? It is called the Encyclopedia of Life and is said to be a Wikipedia of sorts for the web of life. I call it incredible!

According to a fascinating article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Missouri Botanical Gardens is one of five major contributers that will help in a global effort to compile this valuable information to one website by providing the data for most of the 400,000 plants that have been discovered in the world.

Evidently, other projects have failed in their attempts to make these types of lists of species because of
a lack of funds. The Encyclopedia of Life may just have the money to make this project a success thanks to donations from the John D and Catherine T MacArthur foundation and the Alfred P Sloan foundation. Their contributions, totaling 12.5 million dollars, will be matched over the first 2 1/2 years by the consortium members.

The website is accessible now but only with demonstration pages. Once the site is totally functional, data entry will be limited to scientists but the goal is to have visitors contribute, Wikipedia style, to make this resource as interactive as possible. You can imagine, it is going to take some time but once the information of all known living things is recorded then they can get to the living things that are now extinct.

The site will be free to everyone and will have over 300 million pages that include maps, photos and research. This 10-year project is totally under way and looks to have 50,000 entries finished by the end of next year. Your involvement is crucial in helping to refine range maps, so get out those binoculars and magnifying glasses and start spotting those species.