My new favorite website: Encyclopedia of Life

I'm pretty much head over heels in love with this website: Encyclopedia of Life. It is a massive effort to create one huge database for information about all of life. I'd stumbled on the website once or twice before, I think, but it must have been early in the stages of development, because I came away unimpressed. But recently I was contacted be the director of operations to see if I could give some feedback on the project (and when someone's contact information includes the words "Smithsonian Institution" you don't say no) and I am BLOWN away. Such an incredible resource for plant lovers!

The site is great to find good information on incredibly obscure plants... for example, my friend Kelly Norris recently has been gloating on facebook about his Silphium albiflorum. It is a lovely plant I know basically nothing about...

Type that name into eol, and I get tons of great stuff:

Pictures, ranging from herbarium sheets to the whole plant habit to close ups of the flowers!

Maps, showing where exactly this has been observed in herbarium records, giving an approximation of the range of the plant:

No, you aren't going blind... there are just TWO tiny spots there in texas. Not a big range on this thing.

These maps a really useful when I'm trying to figure out how hardy something might be. For example, I'm all gaga for Ononis right now, but most of the things I'm growing are basically not in cultivation, so it is hard to get information on how hardy they are.

Type Ononis spinosa into EOL, and...

Those yellow spots go PRETTY far North... don't think winter cold is going to be a problem.

Ononis cenisia (syn, O. cristata) on the other hand...

Doesn't look to promising. We'll see. But I'll be sure to give it some extra protection just in case.

EOL also rocks because it is just for organisms... So you can search for plant names without getting a lot of other clutter.

For example, a Google search for Fabiana gives me this:

Um... NOT quite what I was looking for...

But EOL gives me this:

MUCH better.

The other thing I love about this is getting the proper names for plants. As I learned in my podcast about the naming of plants, there is no organization that decides on one official scientific name for a plant. Rather, if a scientist thinks as name should change, they publish a paper saying so and why, and if other scientists think that makes sense, they start using the new name, and if they don't, they don't. Official names are arrived at by slow consensus... which makes it confusing for the poor gardener who just wants to know the dang name is.

So... if I want to know about, say, bleeding heart, I type Dicentra spectabilis  into EOL, go to the names tab, and I see this:

Three different sources, all listing the possible names of this plant, with the name they prefer marked with a green spot. So, I can see that one has switched to the new Lamprocapnos, but the other two are sticking with Dicentra, which makes me feel fine about staying with Dicentra as well, even though the only reason I don't want it to change is because I can't SPELL Lampro-whateveritis.

But when I do the same thing with Anemonella... turns out they all agree it is Thalictrum now. Guess I'm going to have to get used to that one...

Other cool things to do with EOL:

Find pictures that drive my ever growing obsession with Gladiolus into even wilder frenzy:

And browse randomly to discover useful facts like that a Koala weighs 0.36 grams at birth, or discover that raccoons first appeared between 1.8 and 4.9 million years ago, and there are TWO references which say that raccoons feed on american alligators! That is has got to be a bad ass raccoon. 

In short, it is a delightful rabbit hole of delightful information! I'm thoroughly entranced.