Claire Hsiang-Ying Li, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Kun-Chi Lai, Kwang-Tsao Shao

Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei , Taiwan

The Taiwan Encyclopedia of Life (TaiEOL) project began in 2011 and will last at least three years. With open source software such as the LifeDesks modules, developed by the global Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) project, Drupal content management system and community participation, an integration platform has been built to integrate species checklist, specimen records, references, images, videos, occurrence data and descriptions of species. In 2012, TaiEOL starts to invite experts and citizen scientists to join this project and contribute data using Chinese language. Eventually, the biodiversity information will be distributed to EOL and shared with the global community.

Biodiversity of Taiwan

Most of the known 54,000 species in Taiwan are plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. The information are scattered in multiple databases or nongovernmental websites. Additionally, the information mainly focus on more popular and economical species.

Current TaiEOL Content (July 2012)

Number of taxon pages with content………………………...…8,023 Number of Photos……………………………………………..……….14,151

Further work

• Invite more related communities & taxonomists to participate

• Integrate more varieties of biodiversity contents

• Cooperate with EOL and share freely accessible data

• Apply open standards and develop semantic searches

Project Goal

To provide ecological pictures and taxon descriptions for more than 20,000 species, especially those of endemic and endangered species, by 2014.

About TaiEOL The Taiwan Encyclopedia of Life (TaiEOL) project is supported by the Taiwan Forestry Bureau and Academia Sinica. Its goal is to describe all Taiwanese species. The objectives are to integrate databases and websites as well as encourage the scientific community and general public to participate in building a domestic EOL. The Taiwan Biodiversity Bibliography website also record the number of species been written in various reference sources. TaiEOL will collaborate with EOL to provide free and open access to knowledge in order to promote biodiversity research, education, conservation and sustainable utilization.

TaiEOL Portal

Community Engagement

TaiEOL provides customized platform for digitizing the publications of biodiversity, managing personal biodiversity content and upgrading old databases. Citizen scientists can contribute content from their own data and catalyze contributions from others in their scientific communities.

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TaiCOL Checklist

Taxon

Descriptions

Images

Biological

classifications

Occurrence

Records

Bibliography

Link to Other Information TaiEOL organizes knowledge and information in addition to integrate, through scientific names, related specimen records, bibliography, images, videos, occurrence data and species descriptions.

Biodiversity Bibliography The TaiEOL bibliography website lists the species with Chinese descriptions from the biological publications in Taiwan. So far, there are over 70,000 pieces of Chinese descriptions of about 11,000 species.

Species search Users can key in a vernacular or scientific name to locate the taxon through dropdown list.

Collections There are several taxon-focused themes which will guide users to discover interesting topics and learn more about certain species.

Galleries Users can view all the photos here, then click to see details of each photo, e.g., names of provider, photographer…

Popular photos The top 5 photos are shown every day in this area.

News Users can find out the activities of TaiEOL and other related projects.

Facebook The Fan page on Facebook is built here; latest news are updated intermittently.

Establishment of Taiwan Encyclopedia of Life