A multinational effort to catalog, describe, and provide as much information about all the species on the planet is being undertaken by kiterally hundreds of institutions worldwide. This effort is expected to take at least 12to 25 years and will be 300 million page compilation of information of all the worlds species. The first efforts are to catalog the simplest life forms, then plants and animals , followed by fossil species. The entire effort may talley up to 50 BILLION species, with only about 5 million believed to be extant ( we are certain of almost 2 million species.
300 pages on the web, when printed out, will be about 52000 miles or twice around the earth, so dont get any ideas of printing out a notebook. More information
The Encyclopedia of Life
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