We’ve just started working on a major new science initiative dedicated to revolutionizing how people access and experience biodiversity information. It’s about empowering people with a central source for information about the millions of known species on all of planet Earth and their relationships to one another.
What Is It?
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) project is bringing together an impressive array of partners in academia, museums, and industry. We’re pleased to be contributing with a host of accomplished researchers, curators, and other groups like Google, Microsoft Research, Perceptive Pixel, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. You can find a partial list at EOL.org. Some of them host or curate data that will be integrated. Others are investigating innovative new ways for scientists and the general public to interact with all that data. Right now, the EOL web site is building a page with information for every known species. It’s already a great resource (check it out!) but there are even more ambitious goals for the future. For example…
Why don’t ‘Kings Play Chess On Fine Glass Surfaces’?
The ancestral relationships between species holds some of the most important lessons about life on Earth. Does anyone else remember, “Kings Play Chess On Fine Glass Surfaces”? That was the mnemonic I learned in school for the taxonomy of life: Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species. Well it turns out that systems like that one were designed to lump life forms together often based on the similarity of their physical form, or morphology. But there’s a lot of room for disagreement, and we can’t be sure that things that look alike are actually related. Sometimes the same feature evolves multiple independent times.
However, genetic tests can provide an exciting alternative: grouping by ancestral relations. You can trace which strain this year’s influenza came from and show that whales came from a common ancestor of the mouse deer (seriously). Of course there are some gaps as we follow the tree branches back toward the common origin of all life, but scientists already have the structure of many ancestral groups with thousands of related species. They can also fill in some gaps with the other methods when they’re confident. Imagine how complex the whole tree would be, all the way back through over 3 billion years of life! How could you effectively find your way around it? Can we show details of each species and retain the context of the whole? How could it reveal interesting patterns while it helps you get the information you came for?
Artefact’s Role
We’ve volunteered to approach these problems from a user-centered design perspective. What information do conservationists, teachers, citizen-scientists, students, librarians, artists, and others need? What tasks can we help them with? Later we may design concepts and test their value. We hope to be involved for some time.
Part 1 of ?
This is the first of many posts on this project. I’ll be writing about our process and progress, maybe even asking for ideas from readers like you. Our next step will be getting the perspectives of the experts involved. Stay tuned! Today was just an introduction. In the meantime, here are some fun links to whet your appetite on the subject:
- EOL feature poll: Tell EOL directly what their web site should add next!
- Wellcome Tree of Life: a great short video on the history of life along with an interactive tree
- Tree of Life Web Project: a partner with lots of structural information about groups of life forms
- Ask Nature: a partner describing human applications for nature’s functional adaptations
- ARKive: imagery and video of life from numerous providers along with lots of other information
- WWF WildFinder: see at-risk species on a map based on eco-regions
- Nature Conservancy local preserves: find your own local nature preserve and go exploring