EOL

Eol, also known as the Encyclopedia of Life, is a comprehensive digital resource that aims to increase awareness and understanding of life on Earth. Their vision is to provide global access to knowledge about all living organisms, including animals, plants, fungi, protists, and bacteria. Eol gathers, generates, and shares this knowledge in an open, freely accessible, and trusted platform.

Their methods involve identifying legally and practically shareable sources of biodiversity knowledge, enriching their structure using modern data tools, and integrating them with other knowledge. They aggregate these sources into a combined knowledge base and provide access to it through granular level search tools and data services. Eol collaborates with data hubs worldwide to support interoperability and sharing.

Eol works with open access biodiversity knowledge providers, museums, libraries, universities, research centers, scientists, graduate students, citizen science communities, and international open data hubs. Their community includes individuals who generate data, photos, videos, and descriptive text, as well as bioinformaticists, technicians, publishers, and integrators. Eol is hosted by various institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, Marine Biological Laboratory, and New Library of Alexandria.

They also collaborate with global bioinformatics projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Barcode of Life, Catalogue of Life, and Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Eol's current platform, EOL v3, was launched in November 2018. It provides updated features and improvements compared to the previous version.

To support their mission and contribute to their valuable work, individuals can donate to Eol or get involved through their forum, education programs, or by citing their resources. Eol offers information on a wide range of organisms, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fishes, crustaceans, mollusks, insects, spiders, worms, flowering plants, trees, fungi, mushrooms, molds, bacteria, algae, protists, archaea, and viruses