ESA 2009: Contributing to the book of life
The exhibit hall here at the ecological meeting seems oddly empty -- or maybe that's just because I hit it at a down time when free beer wasn't being offered. I did spend some time flipping through the fancy new materials at the unstaffed booth of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), the ambitious effort to catalogue the planet's species onto a one-page-per-species website.
The site is still in its early days -- a little browsing uncovers skimpy entries for many species, but such is the nature ofa work in progress. But I was intrigued by one new social-networking push to get more content. If you've got a Flickr account, you can add your pictures of various animals and plants to the EOL. Just join the EOL group, upload your pix, and change the license. You then tag the photo with the common and/or genus and species name of the organism in the picture. Et voila!
One thing not clear to me: what happens if you misidentify your critter?
Image: Canis lupus familiaris, common name Angie
