Scientist will publish the first draft of the Encyclopedia of Life online, The Times reports.

The encyclopedia will detail every living organism and will include all 1.8m known plant and animal species with pictures and distribution maps and each will be represented on it’s own webpage in a huge archive.

The first 30,000 pages of the encyclopedia will be published this week, focusing on fish, birds and large mammals.

Using a Wikipedia type set up the research and data for the encyclopedia will come from many different sources such as The Natural History Museum (NHM) of London, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Although the first draft is a cause for celebration it is merely a drop in the ocean when you consider the fact that it’s just over one and a half percent of the finished product.

Read the full story on the TimesOnline.