Rapid Response team

If you are interested in helping EOL improve its information about biological diversity, and enjoy research, writing, and finding images, please join the team. We often have specific projects that require great effort in a short amount of time.

How to add information to EOL

To add an article directly to EOL, go to the Detail tab on any EOL taxon page and look for the add an article to this page button at the top of the page. This will take you to a form where you can select a topic for your contribution and enter your text and references. Any text you add will immediately go live on the EOL site, but unless you are registered as a full curator, your articles will initially be marked as unreviewed. Whenever you want to edit one of your text contributions, go to its data object info page, which you can access through the learn more about this article link in the Detail tab. There will be an edit this article button near the top of the page. See Add an Article Help for more information

How to add images to EOL

If you have your own images that you can contribute, the easiest way to do this is through iNaturalist or the Encyclopedia of Life Images Group on flickr. For more information see How to Contribute Content to EOL.

Note that EOL can only use images if they are released under a creative commons license that's compatible with the EOL licensing policy. "All rights reserved" images or images that are subject to a license that does not allow reuse for derivative works cannot be featured on EOL.

If you don't have your own images, you can still help by finding suitable images on the web. If the images you find are already released under a compatible license, you can simply ask the image owners to post them to iNaturalist or the Encyclopedia of Life Images flickr group. If the image owner is not interested in using these sites, we can upload their image to our EOL Rapid Response LifeDesk (for images supplied by scientists) or EOL Interns LifeDesk (for images that need confirmation of the species identification). If you find images that are "All rights reserved" or have a "NoDeriv" license, you can try to convince the image owner to release the image under a compatible license, e.g. a ShareAlike or NonCommercial license, so EOL can use it. If the owner does not want to release a full resolution image, they can apply the license to a low resolution version for EOL use.

If you have questions, please post them to the community newsfeed below. Thanks in advance for volunteering!

Team mascot adapted from Marion Schneider & Christoph Aistleitner, Mediocrity