Encyclopedia of Life Blog Update!

Make sure to check out the EOL blog for updates on the Encyclopedia of Life, stories about how people are using EOL and what you can do to contribute to the evolving, on-line encyclopedic of species information.



Biodiversity of the Week! we now have Polar Bears!





The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species. The site is customizable for different levels of detail to serve different needs. You can keep track of what is happening at their blog.

Marie Studer (here's her picture) introduced the site.

• There are many data partners associated with EOL, including Animal Diversity Web.
• Many new features still being worked on. Visit Booth #416 in the exhibit hall.
  

Tricia Jones talked about how Animal Diversity Web is used in higher education. The obvious uses are as a reference, a textbook supplement or replacement, or virtual museum. The ADW is written for college students, primarily by college students, as they write species accounts using the structured online template. This text is now being incorporated into EOL, so this is one way students can contribute to EOL. The other major use of ADW is the 'data mining' aspect, using a structured search tool to query the database of keywords and numeric values. This was discussed more in a Saturday afternoon workshop.

Elliott Bennett discussed how Martha's Vineyard Regional High School documented all the life on their island in partnership with EOL, including species descriptions and photographs.

• This prompted the creation of the EOL Flickr group.

Chris Bowser, who works on the Hudson River Estuary (a new EOL data partner) and NYSDEC discussed citizen-science field work and how to collaborate with EOL.

• They do an annual large-scale river monitoring event, and decided to focus on the American Eel as a flagship organism to bring the community together. The data were primarily gathered by high school students.

Tracy B. has posted some useful Word documents on using EOL in K-12 and some worksheets for high school. They can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

• During the Q&A we heard from Michele Bahr about the Wolbachia Project (part of Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole) to collect local insects and look at symbiotic bacteria. Notes from their Friday 3:45 PM presentation can be found on the Discover the Microbes Within page.
  

Post your thoughts on how to use EOL (or your questions), either directly on this page or on a discussion thread. You can also visit the EOL forum discussion.