Encyclopedia of Life Blog

The BioSynC’s latest initiative in digital learning, a virtual coral reef, is live online! The reef learning environment, called WhyReef, just launched in Whyville.net.  You can access the reef directly (after an intro screen) at reef.whyville.net . Its free to join or you can sign in as a guest.

WhyReef’s goals are to teach about the diversity of life on reefs, the interconnectedness of species, collaborative counting of reef species, and how to mobilize to “fix” the reef if/when something goes wrong. We will report back in a few weeks on progress and lessons learned.

We set a pretty insane timeline for ourselves and had only 90 days from grant to launch! Our team included staff at BioSynC (Beth Sanzenbacher, Mark Westneat, and Audrey Aronowsky), Field Museum (Johanna Thompson, Elizabeth Babcock, and Krystal Villanosa) and Numedeon, the parent company of Whyville (including Jen Sun, Jim Bower, Mark Dinan, CJ Circo, and Alfred Lo). It has been an exhausting stretch, but Beth, Jo, and Mark D have been amazing!

The virtual reef project is funded by MacFound DML and is our first major foray into virtual worlds and education. We have collaborated on some smaller scale, pilot projects with Global Kids; including the fantastic “I Dig Tanzania!” pilot in Teen Second Life.

Here are some of the highlights of the press coverage surrounding the recent launch. Most of the major news media addressed it in various degrees of thoroughness and each article has its own tone, some are very encouraging while others take a more cautionary stance. Check them out and form your own opinions. Here is the New York Times, The BBC, The Boston Globe and Nature News. There is also a site that has links to much of the press coverage of the EOL in the past year, but is also updated daily and includes major news sources as well as blogs and online columns. There are articles ranging all the way back to the first mini-launch in May 2007 posted and more appear daily. Enjoy!

Also, not listed in the site above, or anywhere online, the EoL was described in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Royal Entomological Society, Antenna (Winter 2008 Volume 32 (1)) on p. 68) in the section called “Embiopteran Tools”. It is exciting to know that the word is being spread about the potential of the EOL to be useful in numerous fields of biology.

The Biodiversity Synthesis Center (BioSynC) is located in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Our charter goal is to generate new insight into life’s diversity, evolution, distribution and conservation. Integrating diverse information sources empowers people to generate new questions, insights and discoveries. We do this by supporting and hosting scientific meetings to explore topics in biodiversity, such as taxonomy, biogeography, phylogenetics, and bioinformatics. Meetings are proposed by the scientific community to assemble novel and complimentary groups of people addressing central questions in biodiversity. Our task is to help to recruit experts in biodiversity, computer science, and conservation to the Encyclopedia of Life, and in this way we act as a main liaison between the EOL and both the scientific and academic communities.

We are concerned not only with what goes into the EOL, but with what could potentially come out of it. The possible applications for newly pooled data made easily accessible by the EOL are numerous and multifaceted. From creating new ways to visualize the evolutionary tree on the internet, to furthering the study of underrepresented and popularly unknown species, our hope is to have impact on the scientific community contributing to the EOL, the daily lives of the greater global citizenry, and the fight to conserve biodiversity on our planet.