When asked to describe what it’s like working at EOL, I sometimes compare it to a duck gliding across a pond: we seem serene and calm on the surface, but underwater we’re all paddling hard!
It has been a year of changes and challenges for the entire EOL team as we look ahead to our ten-year anniversary coming in the fall of 2017. To prepare for this important milestone, we are simultaneously working to enhance EOL’s core functionality and steadily improving how our back-end systems perform, an especially important task given the increases in content and traffic that we’ve seen over the last five years. Following the migration of our production data center earlier this year, we have been focusing on retooling our content harvesting framework, which has resulted in our delaying the re-harvesting of large content data sets from a number of our content partners (such as Flickr). We appreciate your support during this important effort, and we especially appreciate your patience if you see some content items show up in some unusual places.
EOL’s infrastructure for gathering, curating, organizing and serving a variety of biodiversity information is an important resource to many communities: students and their teachers, researchers and explorers, software developers and content creators. We’re excited to be a trusted ingredient of a growing number of digital services - and we’re looking forward to announcing new relationships over the coming weeks and months that highlight the important role EOL plays on a global level.
On behalf of the entire EOL team, thank you for your support and your enthusiasm for the Encyclopedia of Life.
All the best,
Bob Corrigan EOL Director of Operations and Secretariat
National Museum of Natural History
Washington, DC
A New Taxonomic Tree Tool
How much do taxonomists agree on the evolutionary relationships among species— for example, Chinese birds? You will soon be able to use the new Taxonomic Tree Tool to visualize the answer to this question.
The Taxonomic Tree Tool (TTT) is the work of Jiangning Wang and EOL Rubenstein Fellow Congtian Lin at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the site of the EOL China Regional Center. We are happy to announce that the TTT is supported by EOL data services. Using a free TTT account, you can use the tool to compare branches from any two of the classifications available on EOL, including the Catalog of Life, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and others.
You will see Zheng's view in blue and Li's view in red; where both taxonomists agree will be shown in green.
Making observations in the field, Indiana Dunes National Park BioBlitz. Image Credit:
Encyclopedia of Life, CC-BY
Learning Resources
Looking for new and engaging ways to teach about biodiversity? We are excited to share several Education and Learning Resources
developed using multimedia and content from EOL and paired with lesson plans or classroom activities.
Resources are aimed at Grades 6-8 (ages 11-13), but the different components can be adapted for younger and older students.
Paulo Mateus is an EOL curator specializing in Brazilian reptiles and amphibians. In addition to working on his master's degree at the Universidade Federal Rural dePernambuco and doing field work in the Atlantic Forest in northeastern Brazil, Paulo is doing curatorial work on EOLtaxon pages and translating many of the
Topics in Biodiversity articles into Português do Brasil. Check out the
Algae,
Reptiles, and Amphibian articles he has translated. Obrigado, Paulo!
We’ve Moved: eol.org Migrates to a New Data Center
Those of you who have been following EOL for a while will remember the launch of the first EOL website in 2008 and all the excitement that accompanied it. At the time, EOL was hosted in a small server complex at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass.
For the release of the second version of EOL in 2011, hosting of the website migrated to the Research Computing Center at Harvard in Boston. In anticipation of the 10th anniversary of EOL in 2017, and with an eye toward increases in usage of both EOL and its new TraitBank® data service, EOL migrated in April of this year to a new hosting environment at the Smithsonian Institution's data center in Herndon, Va. You can track the activity of these servers through a dashboard created in partnership with interns from the Google Summer of Code project at http://sysopia.eol.org.
Over time we expect the EOL production server environment will continue to increase in size and power as demand for EOL grows past the 6.5 million unique users who visited EOL last year.
MA STEM Summit - promoting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from childhood to adulthood on November 10, 2015 at the DCU Center in Worcester, Massachusetts.
iDigBio Summit V
- The Summit is a meeting of representatives from TCNs, iDigBio, and other activities related to the Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program. The Summit will focus on discussions of shared goals, challenges, opportunities, and collaboration. It will be held November 4-6, 2015, in Arlington, Virginia.
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