SCIENTISTS are to release the first draft of an Encyclopedia of Life detailing everything known about all living organisms, from the aardvark to the zebu.

When complete the project will detail all 1.8m known plant and animal species. Each will have its own web page in an online archive that will include photographs, genetic information and distribution maps.

This week will see the release of the first 30,000 pages of the project, which will focus on fish, amphibia, large mammals and birds.

It is regarded by the scientists as a triumph but just a small percentage of the likely final total. “This is a great event,” said Lord Robert May, a former president of the Royal Society who is an adviser to the project. “It will help us to sort out all the different species and create a single consistent database.”

Scientists have long dreamt of creating a comprehensive encyclopedia listing all known life, but the volume of data accumulated over 250 years of research left everyone who tried it in despair.

However, the advent of Wikipedia and its revolutionary use of so-called “mash-up” software, to aggregate vast amounts of data from disparate sources, showed researchers how they could achieve their dream. The Natural History Museum (NHM) of London, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington are just three of the many centres pouring data into the encyclopedia. About 2.5m pages of ancient academic journals, drawings and photographs have been scanned into computers ready for publication.

One possibility is that the finished encyclopedia could also include links to video clips taken from television programmes. This weekend the project won the approval of Sir David Attenborough, the maker of programmes such as Life on Earth and the current Life in Cold Blood. “This is a hugely welcome project and long overdue,” he said.

The science of classifying the natural world began with Carl Linnaeus, who published his famous Systema Naturae in 1735. He had promised a classification of every known living thing but by the time he reached his 13th and final edition in 1770 and his original 11 pages had expanded to 3,000, it was still incomplete.

Since then scientists around the world have continued to catalogue and research individual species. But data and specimens were often left buried so deep in academic libraries and archives that they were inaccessible to most researchers.

Graham Higley, head of the NHM’s library and information services, organised the international conference that kick-started the Encyclopedia of Life project. He has been overseeing the scanning and digitisation of millions of pages of scientific records held at the museum.

“Identifying species correctly is critical. Cataloguing species and monitoring concentrations of known species or their appearance in new locations is vital, for example, to monitor the impact of climate change,” he said.

The Encyclopedia of Life is one of a number of initiatives aimed at recording every last detail of life on Earth. All are at least partly driven by the knowledge that many species could soon be sent into extinction by habitat destruction, climate change and exploitation. One scheme is the Frozen Ark project, also based partly at the NHM, which aims to store deep-frozen DNA from endangered animals. Kew Gardens is attempting a similar project to conserve the world’s plants in its millennium seed bank in West Sussex.

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