With technology finally matching ambition, documenting all the world's species is finally possible, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL.

BE CAREFUL what you wish for, because it might just come true - and involve thousands of people going online over the next decade to document the planet's millions of known biological species. Such a resource would provide scientists with information on biodiversity and raise public awareness of the need to protect it.

That's what renowned Harvard biologist and conservationist Edward O Wilson wished for in an address to a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in Long Beach, California: "I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life."

And so it came to pass. One year ago this month, with funding from foundations and academic institutions, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) project started to create a website to document all of the world's known species. Which, by the end of the current 10-year plan, should number around two million.

It's an ambitious undertaking - gargantuan, in fact - but the team behind the EOL believes the time is right. "The concept of creating a central resource for every species has been around for about 15 to 20 years, but the only way you could have done it realistically was on paper, which was never going to be achievable," says Graham Higley, head of library and information services at London's Natural History Museum and board member of the EOL.

But publishing online is a different matter and, with the cost of scanning material dropping and new technologies combining multimedia and 'wiki'-style pages, the stage is now there to be taken, according to Higley.

The resulting website will be a central repository, where scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike can access or share information straight away about specimens - which is particularly important for species that may not be around for much longer, he notes.

"With rarer or endangered species, it is fairly critical that we get that information out there much more quickly than we traditionally have. It can feed into habitat decisions by local policy-makers who are making decisions about particular environments," he says.

But the site's speed will be no excuse for putting up slapdash or sloppy data. Scientific and lay experts will monitor the online 'wiki'-style environment, and help ensure the information is valid, explains Higley. "There's a whole range of communities, the hardcore scientists, highly skilled amateur groups, individuals, and field taxonomists, who are really expert on local groups of species in their country, and probably the best people on the planet to provide the information."

All those watching eyes will hopefully mean more accurate species descriptions, notes Higley: "In my experience, people's identification skills are not as good as they think they are. Species are misidentified quite frequently and it has often ended up in an ecology journal as a description of having found something in an area where they haven't at all. We hope it will help with that."

As the descriptions roll in, Higley believes the EOL will become an invaluable on-the-spot field guide, particularly in the developing world where environmental destruction can hit hard.

"We have a vision for a few years' time where taxonomists in the field will either have a laptop or a mobile and they can call up the information," he says. "The future with this technology is to make it small and movable, so we are keeping that in mind. And ultimately people will be using it as a field checklist."

It's not just for the scientists to scrutinise species differences though, there's plenty of scope for using the resource as a straight encyclopaedia, says Higley, who suggests that users will be able to scan all known species within a certain radius of their house or school, and find out if there are any endangered creatures or plants living nearby.

Wouldn't the time, money and energy spent on logging species information be better spent on direct conservation efforts? Not so, says Higley. "Frankly, we say you don't need any more conservation organisations - what we need is for them to be working with good information. And that's what we hope we are adding to the value of the conservation debate: a consistent, managed, professional resource to talk about what a species really is."

So far the concept seems to have struck a chord. Last February, an initial release of the embryonic website crashed within hours of its launch under a surge of 11 million hits. On its peak day it drew around 17 million, says Higley. "It was a big surprise for us. We did drop back, but not hugely, we still get hundreds of thousands of hits a day," he says.

The kernel site contains around one million placeholders, 30,000 stub pages for fish and Solanaceae (which includes tomatoes, peppers, tobacco and potatoes), and full pages for over 20 example species.

To date, volunteer scientists have been uploading data on the site and curating their own areas of expertise, but later this year the doors will open for the public to access and upload information. It sounds like a recipe for mayhem, but with good site design everyone should be happy, explains Higley.

"Each website for a particular species will consist of a highly validated area, which is curated by a scientist or known individual. Then there will be a wiki page that people can add comments to, put pictures up on, saying, 'I saw one of these in my backyard, which is strange because I live in Kansas, and it's normally never seen outside Canada'. So it becomes a kind of centre for social interaction."

The site will also link in with other scientific resources, including endangered lists and species monographs. "The best way of describing it is as a scientifically-verified wikipedia," says Dr Peter Wyse Jackson, director of Ireland's National Botanic Gardens.

He believes it's a needed resource but points out that getting the site's access design right will be key to its destiny. "I think it's going to be difficult," he says.

The EOL will link in with a project close to his own heart - he chairs the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation, which is compiling the first ever checklist of the world's known 400,000 or so plant species. "By 2010 there will be the first ever list of the world's flora, and that will provide the basis for what plants are included in the EOL," he explains.

But the internet won't provide a bargain-basement way to name a species after yourself. Some things are best left to proper procedure. "It won't be possible to short-circuit the valid scientific publication of a species," says Wyse Jackson.

He welcomes the involvement of botanic gardens in the EOL, and sees Ireland eventually playing its part. "I'm hoping that, in the years ahead, our staff here will become editors for their favourite plants. So we will certainly play an active role in it."