Chris Cantell Discusses Technologies: Encyclopedia of life published online by Zuzana Krskova

Scientists released first draft on Encyclopedia of life, which contains every available information about all living organisms on the Earth.Authors are planning to have detail information about all 1.8 million known animal species and plants after the completion of the project. They also have already set up 1 million placeholder pages. Each specie will have its own web page in an online archive. It will also include photographs, genetic information and distribution map."Identifying species correctly is critical. Cataloguing species and monitoring concentrations of known species or their appearance in new locations is vital, for example, to monitor the impact of climate change," said Graham Higley, head of NHM's library and information services.On Tuesday were released first 30,000 pages focused on fish, amphibia, large mammals and birds. "This is a great event," said Lord Robert May, a former president of the Royal Society who is an adviser to the project."It will help us to sort out all the different species and create a single consistent database."Help for researchers was also Wikipedia and its revolutionary use of software, that aggregates vast amounts of data from different sources. Also helpful were The Natural History Museum of London, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Smithsonians Institution in Washington. In this project were used about 2.5 million pages of ancient academic journals and all the pictures, drawings and photographs were scanned into computer. It is also possible, that encyclopedia will include links to video clips taken from TV programmes.The Encyclopedia of Life is one of projects, that are trying to record a life on Earth, driven by the knowledge that many species are near extinction. There are many reasons like habitat destruction, climate change and exploitation.

by Zuzana Krskova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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