Meeting Abstract

P1.22  Sunday, Jan. 4  Using the Encyclopedia of Life for New scientific discoveries: the Biodiversity Synthesis Center STRILEY, D.S.*; BUDEN, A.T.; ARONOWSKY, A.; WESTNEAT, M.W.; Biodiversity Synthesis Center, Field Museum; Biodiversity Synthesis Center, Field Museum; Biodiversity Synthesis Center, Field Museum; Biodiversity Synthesis Center, Field Museum aaronowsky@fieldmuseum.org

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has a simple but ambitious vision: to develop a webpage for every species on earth that is freely accessible to all and contains up to date, vetted scientific information. Recently launched, the EOL is moving quickly towards it goal, currently featuring almost 100,000 species pages containing multimedia visualizations of species and their ecosystems, descriptive text, and links to a vast library of scanned scientific literature. This unprecedented resource will serve as a primary research and educational tool for a worldwide audience that includes scientists, government agencies, conservationists, teachers, and students. To extend the EOLs impact and to begin using it to answer vital scientific questions, the Biodiversity Synthesis Center (BioSynC) functions as the EOL think tank. As such, it is a place where researchers and academics from around the world gather in focused Synthesis Meetings to ask and answer new scientifically revolutionary questions about the biology of life. Synthesis meetings cover a range of topics, including; megadiverse groups, novel research questions in biogeography, evolution, systematics and taxonomy, visualization of large data sets, and the study of biodiversity hotspots. We will present summaries of recent synthesis meetings which have developed content and informatics tools for the EOL. We will also demonstrate some of the new tools to allow systematists to organize and archive their content on the EOL.