The Road to TraitBank What's Next for the Encyclopedia of Life

eol.org@eol

A webpage for every species

EOL Today

Key Milestones in 2013

1.1 million species pages

242 content providers

3 million unique visitors from 223 countries & territories

GenBank 60 million DNA sequence records

900,000 species 4,000 genomes

How are these related to traits?

First step: add traits to EOL

Funded: Marine focus

<scientific name> <name of attribute> <value><scientific name> <preysOn> <scientific name>

Harvest and display on data tabDownloads, fancy searchingMachine access

Next step: Create TraitBank

• Scale up • Promote best practices• Promote new tools &

analysis• Enable crowd-sourcing

Quick math

In Phenoscape57 publications had 565,158 anatomical trait descriptions for 2,527 kinds of organisms= 223 traits/organism

In ZFIN 38,189 trait descriptions for 4,727 genes for ZebraFish

1.9 million species on the planet

= LOTS OF TRAITS

Why EOL + TraitBank

EOL

Crowds

Harvest

Third party applications

Why Smithsonian + TraitBank

Final words

Dream bigStart simpleFuel ongoing innovation

ThanksFunding & other contributionsSloan FoundationSmithsonian InstitutionDavid RubensteinMarine Biological LaboratoryHarvard UniversityOur content partnersThousands of individual contributors, and hundreds of volunteer curators

Images

Jenny from Taipei

University of Birmingham

JumpStart Youth

The Field Book Project

Animal Diversity Web

Kevin Rolle

Dominik Hofer

Cynthia ParrChief Scientist @eol

@cydparr parrc@si.edu