The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) was founded in the 17th century as a physic garden. Now it extends over four Gardens boasting a rich living collection of plants, and is a world-renowned centre for plant science and education. (link)

We are delighted they have chosen to share some of their holdings with the world through EOL.  Check out their Rhododendron illustrations and their giant collection of botanical type specimens.

Many thanks to 2011 Rubenstein Fellow Roger Hyam for his work to make this partnership possible.

(Photo by Steve Nova)

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest author is Ari Daniel Shapiro from Atlantic Public Media (APM), a non-profit public media organization in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. APM was the recipient of a Google Earth Outreach Developer Grant, funded through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund at the Tides Foundation. We’re excited to showcase how Atlantic Public Media has weaved Google Earth and KML tours into engaging stories about the diversity of life.

Life gets around. Tiny Arctic Terns soar from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and back, in a single year. A kind of sea algae known as “sea grapes” roam from Australia to the Mediterranean as stowaways, and then promptly conquer their new home.

As a radio producer, I’m used to telling these kinds of stories with audio, weaving together interview tape, ambient sound, and narration. For the last two years, I’ve worked with Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) to produce an audio series entitled One Species at a Time. Each episode pays homage to a different organism that gallops or creeps or pulses on our planet. We collaborate on these stories with Marie Studer, the EOL’s Learning and Education Director, who has championed our podcast as way to make the natural world come alive and generate excitement amongst people who want to learn about it and explore.

While our podcast and public radio programming brought these tales of the natural world to listeners all over the planet, we always look for ways to tell these stories better and share them more widely. Eduardo Garcia Milagros, a biologist and KML developer in Spain, approached us last year with the idea to use Google Earth as a platform for these mini-documentaries. Brimming with enthusiasm, he shared “When I first opened Google Earth, I went to see my hometown. Once I started exploring KML capabilities, I realized that Google Earth can be an amazing educational tool, especially when you have a good story.” Inspired by his excitement, we decided to identify species whose stories could really be best illustrated through a map, such as the Arctic Tern’s annual migration.

Incorporating Google Earth into our narratives proved to be an interesting challenge for me and Jay Allison, my editor on the project and the Executive Director of APM. We wanted to make the most of the map as a medium to bring to life the tale of the Arctic Tern and other species for viewers. By integrating geographic animation and imagery from all over the world with the audio and images from contributing scientists, we were able to support and enhance the story. For example, in the sea algae tour below, we circle the globe to the Amazon rainforest to illustrate a phenomenon in the ecology of the Mediterranean.

Caption: Our sea algae tour can also be found on YouTube or downloaded for viewing in Google Earth.

These tours combine voice, sound, images, video, and data-driven animations to explain how two creatures have been able to travel so much of our planet. Coming from a public radio documentary background, we tend to approach things from a purely narrative or poetic angle, but Google Earth tours allow for audio/visual dialogue as well. The movement isn’t purely in the story. The map can become part of a “conversation,” and we’re just beginning to explore the possibilities.

We hope to produce more of these Biodiversity on the Move tours in the future; we’d like to hear what you think of them and what we can improve next time. Drop us a line here on the EOL Blog.

Posted by Ari Daniel Shapiro, Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life 

Learn about recent EOL news, announcements and activities in the January 2012 EOL newsletter.

To subscribe to the EOL Newsletter, check the box in your EOL Profile on eol.org or visit our newsletter signup page on Facebook.

In this episode of One Species at a Time, we join serious beachcombers along the high-tide line of Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. These “shellers” come in search of beautiful sea shells, sometimes no bigger than a grain of rice, that are the remains of marine snails, bivalves, and other mollusks. Along the beach and at the island’s Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum, we learn why Sanibel’s shores are so rich in molluscan treasure, and how shelling has captured the imaginations of scientists and enthusiasts alike. 

Listen to the podcast

Learn more about Epitonium angulatum, a species of shell found on Sanibel.

source: Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, Managing Director, Pensoft Publishers

As a next step in its fruitful collaboration with EOL, Pensoft has created two species collections on EOL – Fabulous ZooKeys New Species and Fabulous PhytoKeys New Species. The main aim of this initiative is to bring together and promulgate the scientifically notable new taxa described every year in Pensoft’s journals and simultaneously registered in EOL.

A short annotation written in a popular language explains why the new species is interesting and draws the attention of the general public and the world mass media. Starting with only a dozen taxon profiles, both collections are expected to grow fast considering that currently ZooKeys ranks second in the top 10 journals publishing new taxa, and is responsible for approximately 2.5% of all new taxa in the world described in the last three years. 

Currently the collections comprise a nice selection of extraordinary newly described animal and plant species, such as:

• The world’s smallest tetrapod, the New Guinea frog Paedophryne depot;
• The Morafka’s desert tortoise Gopherus morafkai, whose discovery based on DNA evidence has conservation implications;
• The tiny Brazilian plant Spigelia genuflexa found to be reproducing by geocarpy;
• The New Zealand liverwort species Frullania knightbridgei, one of the first species described under the revolutionary new rules of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature that allows new species to be published only in a digital form;
• One of the smallest cave-dwelling ground beetles and living fossil, Paralovrcia beroni

We kindly invite the EOL users to join the communities around these collections and to become part of Pensoft’s large family. 

Please visit the Pensoft Publishers Community on EOL to share your comments and questions, or leave them here on the EOL Blog.

Increase in Content Partnerships, Growing Spanish-Language Text, Conservation Content, and Images Boost Encyclopedia of Life’s Value to Scientists and General Public 

Washington, D.C. – January 4, 2012 – The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) continues to expand at a record pace with the addition of new content and partners. At the start of 2012, EOL provides data on nearly half of all described species, with new content in Spanish, rich information about conservation issues from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and NatureServe, and more images and videosthan ever before.

In the four years since its first release, EOL has grown from 30,000 pages with content to more than 900,000, a 2,900% increase, and from a dozen content partners to 190, a 1,480% increase.  Content highlights since the launch of the new version of EOL in September include:

• More than 900,000 Total Pages with Content
• Over 300,000 Species Pages with Botanical Content from Tropicos®
• Over 100,000 Species Pages with IUCN or NatureServe Conservation Content 
• 15,000 Species Pages with Spanish Text
• More than 700,000 Images and 9,000 Videos 

Spanish language content is an important priority for EOL.  In collaboration with El Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) in Costa Rica, La Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO) in Mexico and the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network  (IABIN) in Washington, D.C., EOL now serves information on 15,000 species in Spanish. These leading biodiversity organizations are vital partners in building a truly multi-lingual resource and in helping EOL reach global audiences.  A selection of high quality Spanish-language pages can be seen in the EOL Collection“Paginas destacadas de EOL” (“Featured EOL Pages”).

EOL has recently added new conservation-related information from two partners. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a longtime EOL partner, supplies updated information about the Red List status of more than 40,000 species. New partner NatureServe has provided distribution, habitat, trend, and threat information along with New World range maps and conservation status maps for U.S. states and Canadian provinces for more than 60,000 species.

EOL multimedia content is growing at a rapid pace.  Images and videos come from individual photographers as well as large organizations, museums, scientists and citizen naturalists. The Encyclopedia of Life Flickr group has close to 3,000 members whose contributions to EOL via this photosharing website recently topped 100,000 photos.  Over 9,000 videos complement more than 700,000 images now available on EOL.

In 2012 EOL plans to work on strengthening existing collaborations and building new relationships with contributors around the world.  “We are grateful to our partners and for their unwavering commitment to Encyclopedia of Life as we continue to add content, tools and features,” said Dr. Cynthia Parr, Director of the EOL Species Pages Group. “With their ongoing participation, support, and outreach, we look forward to a new year of exciting opportunities.  Together we can meet the challenge of providing global access to knowledge about all life on Earth.”

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) operates as an ongoing collaboration of individuals and organizations who share the vision to provide global access to knowledge about life on Earth. EOL is supported by founding sponsors the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  Additional support comes from EOL member institutions and donations from around the world.