Who has the coolest and most comprehensive online "encyclopedia of life?"
It's a hot competition with several contenders. All of them would agree with one of their number, the University of Georgia's John Pickering, that over the coming year the Internet "is going to revolutionize ecology."
Pickering, who spoke at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Tupper Auditorium on May 18, demonstrated his project, www.discoverlife.org, and explained how it is different from other sites that are amassing huge databases of biological information. His sites main claim to fame is that it's not so much one big collection of data but an engine that combines many other people's databases.
Through discoverlife.org, one can look at satellite photos of most of the world, and cross-index the pictures with information on what's living there. But neither he nor the University of Georgia are launching any satellites, nor are they collecting every plant, animal and microbe in the myriad niches that the overhead cameras can see.
But a lot of people, from fourth-grade classes surveying the living things in their school yards to retirees dedicating their golden years to amateur birdwatching to postdoctoral fellows noting the varieties of insects that inhabit various species of strangler vines in Panama, are collecting data, and Pickering's website combines such work so that it can, for example, combine other people's databases and generate a range map for a given species. Not, he notes, a map like the one you will find in field guide to the birds, but an evolving, constantly updating and improving map, one that might, for example, be useful for an agricultural extension agent or customs quarantine officer who needs to know the progress of an invading exotic insect pest.
Combining a lot of other people's work has its problems, possibly the most severe of which is quality. Thus Pickering's engine has a ranking system based on the number of reports and their credibility. As a result, if journalist Eric Jackson reports that he has discovered the man-eating Serrated Fleebydoo Moth in a field near Panama's national bus terminal the tale may be noted but it won't be scored as credible enough to come up when one requests information on the species via a search of discoverlife.org according to the common name this reporter attaches to it. But if the Smithsonian biologists Egbert Leigh and Sunshine Van Bael report finding such a species nearby in the Tupper Center courtyard, and several members of the Panama Audubon Society note it a short ways in the other direction, in the Metropolitan Nature Park, you are far more likely to be able to pull up data if you punch in the word "Fleebydoo."
"You gotta be extremely attentive to data quality," Pickering noted, not only because an amateur like this reporter might confuse the Serrated Fleebydoo from its cousin the Bespectacled Fleebydoo, but because just like with any other website to which somebody can contribute data, there will be some fool who will think it funny to try to post pornography, flame message or other electronic garbage.
Pickering demonstrated how his engine has amassed an amazing series of data on moths, including with views of the various species from different directions and a checklist of characteristics that can quickly narrow down the possibilities when identifying an insect that in a way looks like many others.
The basic design of discoverlife.org is such that a reasonably literate elementary school kid can use it, but at a certain point a minimum of knowledge will ge required to use it intelligently --- for examples, that moths are animals and not plants, or that birds are not mammals.
Pickering was at the Smithsonian not only to show off his work to potential users, but more importantly to recruit sophisticated new sources of information for discoverlife.org. His is a work in progress, and will be for a long time to come. "I want to get all of the plants of the Americas on it in the next year or two," he said as an example.
In his audience there were people who devote much of their time to observations of tiny wasps that pollinate tiny figs, and Pickering needs such people to make a success of his work, but for himself he takes a more macroscopic view. "I just got tired of doing small-scale biology. I got absolutely sick of it," he explained. But now, through his current work, he is confident that "you are going to be able to organize a million study sites."
