Briefs

Salon.com (10/28/02); Mieszkowski, Katharine University of Arizona entomologist David Maddison specializes in studying beetles, a specialty that covers 30,000 species, and according to federal botanist Gary Waggoner, science today has only encountered "maybe 10% of what's out there." Modern science has classified between 1.5 million and 1.7 million species of plants, fungi, insects, and animals. Even within this small spectrum, language barriers and multiple names for the same species hamper research, says Maddison, who is working to place species classification on the Internet.

Maddison's Tree of Life Web Project is an online project dedicated to tracking evolutionary knowledge using data-mining and other database technology. A project called CalFlora aims to catalogue all of California's plants, and All Species Toolkit contains an online database of 873,979 species. The U.S. government has created an Integrated Taxonomic Information System for U.S. vertebrate species, and an international database that includes synonym names for species. All Species Foundation CEO Ryan Phelan says the consensus science community estimate is that about 30 million species exist on earth, with various individual estimates ranging between 5 million and 100 million. UC Berkeley computer science professor Robert Wilensky, who works on the Digital Library Project, predicts future science experiments will involve various international and national databases much like today's experiments involve laboratories.

See http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/28/tree_of_life