About MyEOL The biodiversity of the Malaysian tropical rainforest is so immense that less than 1 percent of its millions of species have been studied by scientists for their active constituents and their possible uses.  When an acre of topical rainforest is lost, the impact on the number of plant and animal species lost and their possible uses is staggering. Scientists estimate that we are losing more than 137 species of  plants and animals every single day because of rainforest deforestation. Surprisingly, scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than they have of how many species there are on Earth. Estimates vary from 2 million to 100 million species, with a best estimate of somewhere near 10 million; only 1.4 million of these species have actually been named.  Today, rainforests occupy only 2 percent of the entire Earth's surface and 6 percent of the world's land surface, yet these remaining lush rainforests support over half of our planet's wild plants and trees and one-half of the world's wildlife. Hundreds and thousands of these rainforest species are being extinguished before they have even been identified, much less catalogued and studied. To date there is still no comprehensive, one-stop digital storehouse for Malaysia’s Natural History content. Much of the country’s historical taxonomic content are housed overseas, such as: The Natural History Museum, London National Museum of Natural History, Leiden The Field Museum of Chicago, USA. Local researchers who wish to have access to such materials stored in other countries have to pay desk fees just to look and record documents of the species (even for making digital images) The Malaysian Encyclopedia of Life aims to address these critical issues and its main objective is to “bring back the country’s natural heritage” from these locations via digital means. What is MyEOL? MyEOL is a “community participatory platform” using the latest Web 2.0 technology to reach out to more researchers, ecologists, nature conservationists and nature lovers who can help scientists to improve the process of species tagging, inventorying and identification. It is South East Asia’s only e-Taxonomy platform It is a “E-Curator Laboratory”, allowing researchers, hobbyist and nature lovers to update species / taxon depository via wiki, and an auto alert system for specialists to verify findings. Species (new taxa or add-ons) will only be confirmed once published on the virtual museum It creates distribution mapping of specific species, thus creating a  snapshot of the biological health status of the country .