Yesterday the massive new database The Encyclopedia of Life launched to great fanfare online. The site is an ongoing project to collect information on all 1.8 million species known to science. The project, funded by the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations, is expected to take 10 years to complete and cost more than $100 million. The project has been compared to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit. The EOL organization hopes for similar success for their site.
Unfortunately for interested surfers, the EOL site has been swamped with traffic and is currently running very slowly, if at all. When the buzz dies down, check out the tens of thousands of listings for plants; it is already very impressive.
