The EOL: Facebook for garden communities

By Gary Raham
Nature Writer and Illustrator

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I joined Facebook the other day and I have to admit--it's a bit overwhelming.

Facebook confronts its online members immediately with a supermarket of human beings. Some of them are friends--and friends of friends--yet all of them are just a fraction of the 6.7 billion human souls that roam the planet.

Now there is a "Facebook" even more exciting. It's called the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an online listing that is on the way to profiling the 1.8 million known species of living things on earth and aiming to corral a significant fraction of the 10 million species thought to exist.

Facebook keeps you in touch with friends, family and potential clients. I discovered some of my distant Canadian relatives online, along with a high school buddy. I also network with writer friends and post my new book covers there.

The EOL will not only help biologists and other scientists get fast and accurate information about critters of interest in medicine, ecology or other lines of research, it will also provide a valuable resource for everyday gardeners and naturalists.

Let's say you're interested in planting tomatoes and want to learn more about the many varieties. Enter www.eol.org on your browser. Type in "tomato" in the find window and 242 kinds of tomato pop up, including the common garden variety, Solanum lycopersicum. Click on that to find a table of contents that leads to further information under "description," "ecology and distribution," and "references and more information." Under the latter category, one choice is a USDA site where you can find all the gardening particulars you desire.

At the moment, all organisms are not covered in this amount of detail. The tomato is one of about 25 "exemplar species" that are highly documented. (Potatoes, peppers and petunias fall within this group, too.)

Tens of thousands of "additional species pages" provide lots of information, all authenticated by scientists with expertise for each species. About one million "minimal species pages" contain limited content, but with links to other valuable information sources.

Thousands of "linking pages" represent higher levels of classification that may help you identify a "mystery creature." For example, you might take a picture of a strange beetle and want to identify it. Maybe it's eating your tomatoes. If you type in "beetle" you can get to their scientific order Coleoptera. Under Coleoptera you can click through various families and compare pictures there with yours.

Citizen scientists can, in fact, contribute photos and expertise to this project. In that sense, it's a bit like Wikipedia. But experts will verify all such material. It's an example of "big science" that is not out of reach of amateurs who want to make a contribution.

"The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs," said E.O. Wilson in an October 2008 blog interview with David Pogue of the New York Times. And such amateurs can still make a difference.

Wilson, an ant scientist perhaps most famous for his eloquent book, "Biodiversity," helped launch the EOL when he won the $100,000 TED prize in 2007. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. Its goal is to bring together talented people from these three worlds and try to fulfill the most ardent dreams of some of them. Wilson said in his acceptance speech that his dream was to create an encyclopedia of life--an absolutely vital step in saving the global environment.

"We need to have this information, this great database, in order to plan strategies that are maximally efficient," he said. Organisms are becoming extinct even before they can be described and studied. Wilson asserts that 90 percent of Earth's life forms are still unknown.

A $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation jump-started implementation of the site that was launched May 9, 2007. Part of the project involves digitizing vast quantities of already published data. To date, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium that holds most of the relevant scientific literature, has scanned just over eight million pages of material for the encyclopedia. About 492 million pages await inclusion.

Some describe the EOL as a biological moon shot because of the scope of the endeavor, but Wilson said that while expensive, it's relatively cheap (and uncontroversial) compared to projects like the Hadron Collider, where a few people fret about the Earth disappearing into an inadvertently created black hole, and religious objections to human stem cell research.

The EOL project is more akin to the great geological surveys of the 19th century--projects that recorded majestic vistas of an under-explored North America and recorded traces of lost cultures and fossil finds detailing ancient extinctions.

Like those surveys, the EOL is sure to inspire artists as well as scientists, and serve as a lure to everyday pioneer naturalists who may find more than they ever imagined in the fields and gardens just beyond their patio doors.