Earth is beautiful.
Earth is complex.
Earth is fragile.
Earth is a delicate inter-dependent web of ecosystems that provides the basis for all life forms.

Constantly reconfiguring, morphing, decaying, the natural world is at once confounding, sublime, brutal, and unspeakably elegant.

There are 1.8 million species that we know of.
And many millions more we don’t even have names for.
Countless are going extinct before we even glimpse them.
Despite serious efforts to catalog Earth’s species, the task has barely begun.

It’s time we embarked on a bigger, bolder effort together.

Let’s call it-Encyclopedia of Life(EOL).

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. The EOL staff is made up of scientists and non-scientists working from museums and research institutions around the world.

The Encyclopedia of Life is an unprecedented global partnership between the scientific community and the general public. Its goal is to make freely available to anyone knowledge about all the world’s organisms.

Everyone can contribute to this encyclopedia via the following ways:

I want to share my knowledge about a group of organisms.

I have images or videos I’d like to share.

I’d like to help improve EOL content.

I’m a professional scientist, and I would like to help curate EOL pages.

I have an online database I’d like to share.

I am part of a community of scientists who would like to assemble information about the organisms we work on.

I’m already contributing information to another project, and I’d like to see this information integrated into EOL.

I’m a scientist, and I would like to devote a considerable amount of my time to working on contributions for the Encyclopedia of Life.

I’m a teacher or college faculty member and would like my students to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Life.

I’m a student and I would like to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Life.

I am a scientist who has compiled an authoritative classification that EOL should be using for a group of organisms.

I have a database of species information, but it is not yet online.

I want to have an Encyclopedia of Life that focuses on the organisms in my part of the world and that presents information in my language.

……

Let’s try to do it and make our own world more complete and beautiful! Everybody counts!

Some sources are from www.eol.org, the official website of Encyclopedia of Life.