An online encyclopaedia aiming to describe every type of animal and plant on the planet has reached 170,000 entries and is helping research into aging, climate change and even the spread of insect pests.
The Encyclopaedia of Life (www.eol.org), a project likely to cost €69.7 million launched in 2007, says it wants to describe all the 1.8 million known species from apples to zebras within a decade.
"We're picking up speed," James Edwards, EOL executive director based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said about the 170,000 entries with content in a common format vetted by experts. A year ago, it had 30,000 entries.
He said everyone from scientists to schoolchildren could use the EOL as a "field guide" or contribute a photograph or an observation of an animal in an area where it was not found before, in some cases a sign of a changing climate.
The Encyclopaedia was aiding scientists who look at human aging, for instance, by examining the widely differing lifespans of related species. A Latin American bat, Tadarida brasiliensis, lives far longer than mice relatives of a similar size, perhaps because its body has a mechanism that limits damage to protein in its cells. And some butterflies that feed on fruit live longer than related species.
"It's working really nicely, the community of scientists working on aging have adopted the EOL," Mr Edwards said.
And the Encyclopaedia was seeking to help combat pests such as moth from the Balkans that has spread fast across Europe in the past two decades. It attacks the leaves of horse chestnut trees and makes them brown by mid-summer.
The moth, Cameraria ohridella, "is now more or less throughout Europe and poses a threat to ecosystems in Southeast Asia, North America and elsewhere - wherever the beautiful horse chestnut trees occur," said David Lees of the Natural History Museum in London and French agricultural research group INRA.
The EOL said it would help "public recognition and awareness of such invasive species through detailed descriptions and maps, helping to slow their global spread and enable more rapid and effective remedial measures".
The EOL was trying to help researchers find out how global warming may affect species, such as by making them move to cooler habitats.
A problem for many biologists is that they often study just one species so do not know if their findings apply more widely, said James Hanken, director of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and chair of the EOL Steering Committee.