EOL-China Regional Center is built up under the cooperation between EOL (encyclopedia of life) and Biodiversity Committee, Chinese Academy of Sciences, whose purpose is to utilize the internet technology and abundant styles of multi-media to exhibit all the species of organism in China. It derives the principle of “one electronic page for each species of organism” from EOL, and describes each species in detail and professionally in multiple aspects and different fashions on each species page. This website can provide reliable, convenient and complete biodiversity information service and makes sense in the fields of scientific research, scientific education and support decision making on biodiversity conservation.

EOL-China websites be composed by a portal and three sub-websites, including animal sub-website, plant sub-website and microbe sub-website. The portal synthetically shows the species information attained from the three sub-websites through web services, and users also can access to the sub-websites for further exploration on a specific taxon. Each sub-website provides the information about relative biological taxa, and each species page contains data of classification, morphological feature, biological character, distribution, pictures and references of a species. They also provide professional and various functions for data search.

EOL-China is funded by Biodiversity Committee, Chinese Academy of Sciences. This project has brought three institutes together and set up three working groups to implement the project, design the website and manage the database.
The participant institutes are:

1、Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Science
(http://www.ioz.ac.cn )

2、Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Science
(http://www.ibcas.ac.cn/ )

3、Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Science
(http://www.im.ac.cn/ )

The working groups are:
1、Overall Design and Operation Group (lead by Dr Liqing Ji)
2、IT Group (lead by Dr Juncai Ma)
3、Species Database Group (lead by Dr Haining Qin)