Encyclopedia Of Life

Help us catalog the amazing biodiversity of our planet by contributing to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) using your iPhone! EOL is an ambitious project to organize and make freely available via the Internet information about all forms of life on Earth.

The first version of the EOL iPhone app allows you to photograph organisms, and have the geotagged photos automatically uploaded to the EOL Flickr Group. EOL will perodically scan this Flickr group for new photos to add to the appropriate pages of the Encyclopedia of Life.

In order for the photos to appear on EOL, they must use one of the "creative commons" licenses and be tagged with a species name - either the common name (e.g. "blue jay") or the scientific name (e.g. "Cyanocitta cristata"). There are instructions on the front page of the EOL group in Flickr. If you arent sure what you are looking at, tag it as best you can (e.g. "plant", "aves", "mammal") and we will try to match it up to the appropriate species. If you are unable to identify organisms, dont worry, tell us what you know and another user will hopefully fill in the gaps. Any photos we are able to match with a page will eventually be shown on the EOL as "not yet reviewed" images. In the future, curators will approve correctly placed images and they will be shown to all users as authoritative.

Welcome to your Encyclopedia of Life!