What Is EOL?

Global access to knowledge about life on Earth

EOL is an unprecedented global partnership between the scientific community and the general public. Our goal is to make freely available to anyone knowledge about all the world’s organisms. Anybody can register as an EOL member and add text, images, videos, comments or tags to EOL pages. Expert curators ensure quality of the core collection by authenticating materials submitted by vetted content partners and individual contributors.

EOL's mission is to increase awareness and understanding of living nature through an
Encyclopedia of Life that gathers,generates and shares knowledge in an open,freely-­‐accessible and trusted digital resource

EOL Component Groups:

EOL is comprised of five component groups:

The Learning + Education Group explores educational uses of EOL for learners of all ages.

The Species Pages Group works to create pages for all 1.9 million named species.

The Biodiversity Informatics Group creates the infrastructure to aggregate data from thousands of sites into species pages.

The Scanning and Digitization Group led by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, digitizes the published literature of biodiversity.

The Biodiversity Synthesis Group facilitates cross-disciplinary involvement of the scientific and academic community.

EOL Cornerstone Institutions:

The EOL project brings together several of the world’s leading natural history institutions, botanical gardens, and libraries, including: Biodiversity Heritage Library, The Field Musuem of Natural History, Harvard University, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution and Marine Biological Laboratory.