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Open Species Database Breaks Half-Million Mark
ferienhausversicherung writes "Biologists estimate that about 1.75 million species, from bacteria to blue whales, have already been identified on Earth. But there may be anywhere between 3 million and 12 million more yet to be discovered. An online catalogue of all known life on Earth now has half a million species in its freely available database. Another promising effort is Wikispecies. Started in August 2004, this is an offshoot of the Wikimedia group, whose free online encyclopaedia is constructed by users themselves." (And Wikipedia itself is about to publish its 500,000th English entry -- if you hurry, perhaps it will be yours.)
A terrestrial ecoregion map of the Earth is available from the National Geographic Society and WWF - United States as their "terrestrial ecoregion map" showing the 8 terrestrial ecozones. According to WWF-US this is "a project which involves describing, mapping and photographically representing 867 Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World. These ecoregions are divided based upon geography, climate, soils, and vegetation... technical descriptions, species lists, educational excerpts, and photographic depictions of each ecoregion... for educational purposes only."
e coregion+map.
Understanding most environmental security problems requires some base map. Unfortunately these maps are not available generally in digital map form, which is one reason a digital ecoregion map standard is required.
There is a digital map petition urging the publishers to make the material available electronically under Creative-Commons by-nc-sa. This helps those interested in helping preserve the 238 Global 200 priority ecoregions and complements WWF's own plans: "Every school in the United States will be sent 10 ecoregion maps and teachers guides to get students interested in visiting the web page. Each ecoregion page will include educational descriptions highlighting important biodiversity features of the ecoregion and a summary of the conservation situation. The technical descriptions detail the biology and status of each ecoregion. There also will be one or more photographs depicting the natural habitat of each ecoregion. It has been a Herculean task to gather photographs of natural habitats of the world. We could not have accomplished as much as we have without your willingness to contribute your images." - David M. Olson, Ph.D., Director, Conservation Science Program, World Wildlife Fund US, email: david.olson wwfus org.
Current the WWF-US seeks only "a) the right to publish the photographs on the World Wide Web as part of the Wild World educational web site created by WWF in association with National Geographic Society, underwritten by Ford Motor Company; b) The right to crop and otherwise alter and edit the photographs, as WWF deems appropriate, to fit space or to enhance the function or effectiveness of use of the photographs."
This comment is licensed under CC-by-nc-sa 2.0 - see http://www.livingplatform.ca/tiki-index.php?page=
Wouldn't it be more usefull integrated with the Open Species Database?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Strange how people seem to be more interested in finding life on other planets, while we still haven't even found everything here yet.
This achievement is great and all, but is there a link to the aforementioned database?
Out of 6 billion strong human species, I am the first to post in Slashdot on this article...woooohooooweeee...heeeee!
i am sorry, but apparently you have fallen short on the tree of evolution...
does anyone else find it odd that such articles (i'm talking about nature.com's article, not the /. article) rarely include actual links to the websites they're referring to? I swear, this is like a conspiracy of the journalists...
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Is is just me or does this seem a really bad idea? With Wikipedia you know what you are getting. The information is most likly correct but you'll take it with a grain of salt just to be sure. You don't really go there when doing research right?
With Wikispecies it's information that is scientific in nature and accuracy becomes paramount.
How long until everyone settles on the truly accurate definition of the Basselope? How about the purple-headed trowser snake?
Bad idea I say.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but the fact is that there are millions of species on Earth, and as part of the natural process of evolution hundreds of new ones evolve every year - but the other side of that coin is that hundreds go extinct every year. We have to balance environmentalism with a healthy dose of logic. We can't cry over every extinct species, and we can't preserve them all.
Obviously, I'm not talking about successful species that are hunted to extinction by humans. I know I'm going to get 50 replies from people who swell up with emotion and react to my words rather than thinking about them, who are going to say, "yeah, but humans cause extinctions." I know that. Thanks. My point is that there are millions of species on the planet and extinction and evolution is a natural process that occurs whether humans exist or not.
I just finished reading Bill Bryson's excellent book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. There's a great story about a tiny island off the coast of New Zealand. The first human to ever live on that island was a lighthouse keeper. It turned out, he had a cat. Every few days, the cat would drag the carcass of a dead bird into the house. The lighthouse keeper sent one of these dead birds to a university professor who recognized that it was a new species, never before seen by science. The professor made the trip down to the island, but by the time he got there, the cat had killed every bird on the little island. Apparently, those birds didn't live anywhere else. They've never been seen again. In less than a year, one cat had made an entire species extinct.
Many an environmentalist will tell you that the point of the story is how destructive human beings are. But I think that if you look at this logically, you'll draw a different conclusion. Long before man arrived, that species of bird had failed to evolve a solid foothold in its ecosystem. With all of New Zealand right there, the best that bird could do was live on one tiny island. It's true, that cat wiped them out. But it's also true that, all by itself and without any human influence, that species had dwindled to down to a population tiny enough to be destroyed by one cat. Had the cat not come along, the next hurricane to hit the island would have made them extinct anyway.
So, there are millions of species on our planet, and I think we should study and catalog all of them. But let's also acknowledge the fact that no matter what we do, 99.9% of those species are going to be evolutionary dead ends.
I noticed they actually had an entry for homo sapiens, which is better :)
than many books of that sort remember. That puts it one step ahead
of print already
Noah's Ark must have been really big to fit all of them. Just a testament to God's great power.
An online catalogue of all known life on Earth now has half a million species in its freely available database.
...
That's awesome.
WHERE THE HELL IS IT?!
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
last post!
(Why hasn't this caught on?)
The Online Slang Dictionary
How do one come up with a figure like that about something one doesn't know? :D
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
Don't worry. At the rate new Bush Administration policies on the environment are kicking into effect, not to mention similar policies by virtually every other corporate government on the planet, vast majority of the species will go extinct long before we discover any extraterrestrial ones.
The sad truth is that such cataloging projects are now just a vain madness associated with the empty hope of a future for humanity. No wonder the banality of religion is quite the rage these days.
Bacteria will rule in the end as they did for eons. The "human" era seems destined to wink out in geological time, in keeping with natural extinction rates in the fossil record.
Where on earth did your "taxonomy" professor come up with such garbage. While species are only cognizable combination of interbreeding individuals that can be diagnoses as having strong phenotypic and ultimately genetic modal variation, one can hardly conclude from this that humans are somehow "the greatest producer of species in the history of the world".
I don't want to burst your fantasy but we are now living in the greatest period of extinction in the history of the planet. If we are creating species, they are most likely bacterial in nature and its anybody's guess as to whether many of these species will survive us, once the slag piles, garbage pits, and waste ponds disappear with our own extinction.
Judging from the level of intelligence displayed in discussing this topic, I guess I must perhaps express a sigh of relief that its just as well we will be winking out in the short term.
It boggle the mind how you feel you are alone, when most of the more familiar species are so genetetically like you, yet you won't feel alone when you find an extraterrestial life form that will certainly have evolved totally independent of you and share NO genetic relation.
None of this will change people's religion as religion is not based on reality or reason, its based mostly on the fear of death and the politics of castigation. People are certainly not about to give that up for ET.
The reason we need to study species is simply put to survive. We are not independent of other species and simply can not survive without them. If you doubt it, then just stop breathing the oxygen produced by millions of years of photosynthesis by alga and higher plants (most of which are now at measurable risk of extinction from antropogenic activity).
Such calcuations can be made by taking into account how many you already know about for a given studied area and then examining the rate at which new ones are being discovered.
If you familiarize yourself with assymptotic functions, then it will become clear to you as to how this can be done. It is a question of establishing an asymptote, by making assumptions about the rate at which the assymptote is reached. Ones assumptions are bounded by the the number of species that are known and the rate at which new ones are becoming known, which are both "known" (or at least observable).
Don't worry you won't be flammed. You just show your ignorance of the natural world. There is no natural law that says that species extinction is balanced by species origination. Indeedd there are numerous periods of earth history in which there have been dramatic declines and increases in the number of known species. Presently, we are in the greatest period of decline ever recorded and its likely to be nearly all the way downhill from here, as eventually our spew finally pollutes the oceans to the point that they no longer support photosynthesis.
I might hasten to point out, however, that it is precisely such ignorance that assures humanity that we will almost certainly be among the 99.9% (actually it may be closer to 90-95%, if you make assumptions regarding bacterial immortality) of the species that WILL go extinct.
However, don't accept this judgement as too harsh, as even if most of us act like saints, the few bad apples will almost certainly spoil the barrel anyway. It only takes a few Hitlers, Stalins, Saddams and Bushes to really screw things up.