Encyclopedia of Life Blog

If you are a blogger with a passion for biological diversity, we suggest you try the Blogger Bioblitz this week, 20-28 September 2008. Usually bioblitzes are huge events organized to bring local citizens and scientists together to one place on one day, so that together they can observe and identify as many species as possible. More outreach than science, they are a whole lot of fun for everyone involved and can even spark some new research directions. Recent bioblitzes have taken place in Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, the Santa Monica Mountains, and EOL has already participated in one in Illinois.

A Blogger Bioblitz is a slightly different beast, with similar goals. To be involved, you simply pick a day between 20 and 28 September, choose a spot, and try to find as many species as possible. Post your stories on your blogs. If you want, upload your images to Flickr, and if you want your data on a map, report your data in a spreadsheet. Colleagues at the University of Maryland Baltimore County are trying out some software to make it easier for everyone to share their data.  We are exploring ways that Encyclopedia of Life can help.

Last year’s Blogger Bioblitz had about forty bloggers, seventeen of whom contributed data.

See the FieldMarking blog for more details and leave a comment if you’d like to join the effort. Also be sure to use the CC-licensed Blogger Bioblitz graphic (courtesy of Jenn Forman Orth) when you write about it on your blog.

We’ve opened up another way for everyone to help build the Encyclopedia of Life.

You may have noticed we still need lots of pictures. You can now now share your best photos and videos of organisms with us by adding them to a Flickr group. For more details, see the description and instructions on the Encyclopedia of Life Images group page. Even if you don’t have your own images to share, you can help add “machine tags” with the species identifications to those that don’t yet have them — these will help us display them on the right pages.

This won’t be the only way to contribute, but many of us already love Flickr, and we hope others will want to give it a try.   The images should start showing up on the site later this year. There already are more than a thousand from the first few enthusiastic group members, including these striking examples (all are CC-licensed; photo credits to Jeff Whitlock, Sarsifer, Valter Jacinto).

I joined the Encyclopedia of Life a few weeks ago as the Director of the Species Pages Group. I’’m based at the Smithsonian Institution, along with the EOL secretariat, but will be working regularly with the other four components of EOL: the Informatics group at Woods Hole, BioSynC at the Field Museum in Chicago, Education and Outreach at Harvard University, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library at many institutions.

That said, as the Director of the Species Pages Group, my primary companions will be the global scientific community. Our goal of 1.8 million species pages in ten years can only be met with intense, coordinated effort. We need to prioritize sharing of digital information already in databases, and target key areas where little information exists online. We need to enrich species pages with knowledge from specialists such as ecologists and physiologists, with observations from museum collections and citizen scientists, and with excellent images and video.

My group works with prospective data partners and will administer a new EOL Fellows program. We’ll be building a curatorial network that will help authenticate contributions from the general public.

How did I get here? My doctoral work in biology at University of Michigan was on the social behavior and communication of crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and I’’ve studied the evolution of magpies (Pica) using DNA sequence and behavior. For the past ten years I’’ve worked on a variety of informatics projects. With the Animal Diversity Web I led the development of species pages by college students, negotiated licensing, and developed software for children observing diversity in their schoolyards. At the Human Computer Interaction Lab at University of Maryland we explored ways to visualize biological trees and food webs. More recently, at both University of Maryland at College Park and at Baltimore County, I’’ve worked on semantic web and social technology for scientists (particularly moth and butterfly experts) and for citizens (ecoblogging). In my spare time, I’m a Flickr fan and a geocacher.

Discerning readers will note a trend. – I resist narrow research bins and just want to find the best ways to build and share knowledge about biological diversity. That’’s my passion, and that’’s why I’’m now with the Encyclopedia of Life.

As I work on the human connections that will build the content of the Encyclopedia of Life I welcome your ideas. You can leave them as comments here, or send me a message via the Contact Us form.

Many thanks to all of you who have already volunteered to help curate pages, and who are busy collecting information to contribute to species pages once our tools are ready. How many people do you think will ultimately be involved in the effort?

Arizona State University’s “International Institute for Species Exploration” has released it’s first State of Observed Species Report. It reports that 16,969 new species were discovered in 2006 (approximately 46 species per day). Not surprisingly, most are insects:

SOS have also published a list of the “top 10″ species described in 2007.

This list has attracted some comment at The Other 95%, Zooillogix, and Catalogue of Organisms.

These lists have implications for EOL. The report gives us a lower bound on the rate of new species description — EOL will need to be able to add at east 46 species pages a day just to keep pace with new discoveries, never mind what has already been described. It isn’t doing anything like this at present, and hence none of the species in the SOS top ten list are in EOL (most are already in Wikipedia, and all return at least some information in iSpecies).

Ken-ichi Ueda told me about iNaturalist.org, a wonderful site he, Nathan Agrin, and Jessica Kline have created for their Masters at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. To quote from the web site:

iNaturalist.org is a place where you can record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world.

It looks gorgeous (lots of Flickr Creative Commons photos), use of Wikipedia, and the TimeMap Javascript library.

Arguably the species pages are clearer than EOL’s (compare Anolis carolinensis on iNaturalist and EOL).But what makes it especially cool is the way it engages users with the ability to add observations of organisms, and request identifications. I like the emphasis on being

…a fun and efficient way to record, find, and share nature observations.

I think its a great project that could provide useful ideas for the design of EOL’s pages.