Encyclopedia of Life

Hooray! As a science teacher I am of course very happy that the Encyclopedia of Life is up and running.

It is an ambitious project aimed at compiling information on every catalogued species, that's no small task when there are 350,000 documented species of beetle alone! Nonetheless they have made a start with 25 exemplar pages like the one for the mosquito below.

"That doesn't sound ike much of an achievement!" I hear you say. The exemplar pages are rich with knowledge: text, images, video, and are the 'ideal' that the EOL is aiming for. There are also tens of thousands of species pages that are on their way to getting there and 1 million 'minimal' pages that need fleshing out.

They have put a call out for people wiling to be 'curator' for one or more species from their field of expertise. Why not sign up if you have the chops?

In the meantime this is another blow to the development of student research skills. It's all there for them.