Generous Donors Give Us Life's Encyclopedia

What the heck is this thing?

Thanks to some foundation donors that value science, you can now check your handy online Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), featured on Tonic today, to discover that the Nepenthes edwardsiana is an insect-eating plant.

The page does not yet include the full complement of authoritative information about the plant, but thanks to these donors, the site engineering is in place so that the page is ready to receive it.

The EOL is a multimillion dollar effort. With a 2007 seed grant of $10 million from The MacArthur Foundation, the project set out to provide what the Foundation Center describes as “authoritative, well-organized species information, including DNA barcodes and other genetic sequences, from diverse global sources.” Information is provided both by scientists and other interested observers, who can upload images and input data for the Web site's pages. Experts verify everything that goes up on the site.

Now, with two recent grants — $10 million from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — the EOL will continue adding to the freely accessible information on more than 150,000 species that has already been compiled. Over the next eight years, the project will accumulate data on 1.8 million pages.

So next time you think to yourself "I really need a free, authoritative and easily accessible source to figure out what the heck is up with the crazy creature below," you'll know whom to thank.

Top photo courtesy of attenboroughii, via Wikimedia Commons. Bottom photo courtesy of jurvetson, via Flickr.