I am pleased to report that our San Francisco staff, with terrific help from some of our ALL Advisors, has made significant progress on a number of fronts that are detailed in this fall newsletter.

Four specific events occurred which have enabled the ALL Species San Francisco office to maintain momentum and to focus on building the Encyclopedia of Life:

1. The Packard Foundation generously granted ALL Species $50,000 in general operating funds. It is a remarkable endorsement of support -especially at a time when they have announced plans to cut up to half of their staff and slash 2003 grants by $50 million.

2. BIOSIS, the life sciences publisher of Zoological Record, contracted with ALL Species to do research on the state of taxonomic information on the web.

3. The California Academy of Sciences has contracted with ALL Species to build AntWeb, a suite of software tools to publish taxonomic content, i.e. images, specimen data and taxonomic lists on the ants of Madagascar and California. AntWeb will also feature a comparison tool to enable users to evaluate species, genera and subfamilies for identification and educational purposes. AntWeb is scheduled to go live on October 31, 2002.

4. NSF approved a $60,000 grant enabling ALL to host two small strategic workshops on our E-Type Initiative at the Smithsonian in the coming months. The vast majority of these funds cover travel and workshop costs, but there is a small amount that will cover ALL's cost for coordination and research.

Integral to ALL's primary mission is encouraging new funding opportunities for inventory, and we are proud to announce this quarter a partnership formed with ALL, NSF, and the Sloan Foundation to create a new $14 million fund for Planetary Biodiversity Inventories. Special thanks go to NSF officers, Quentin Wheeler and Norm Platnick, for helping to envision and shepherd this initiative at NSF, and to Jesse Ausubel at the Sloan Foundation for bringing the prestige and resources of Sloan to this important initiative.

According to our agreement with NSF and Sloan, ALL Species will raise $2M of the $14M over the five-year time frame. Sloan will contribute $1.5M. (Please note, the $14M goes directly to the scientific teams that will be awarded grants; ALL Species Foundation does not receive direct compensation of any kind.)

Also included in this newsletter is a summary of our "Start-up Phase" Business Plan. Clearly, our ability to raise funds will determine the scale and speed with which the plan can be implemented. Strengthening the framework of our strategic alliances will be a key activity in the coming months.

Please take a look at other significant events that happened this quarter especially regarding Inventory, Tools, and Development efforts.

- Ryan Phelan, CEO
rphelan@all-species.org

PS: Please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments regarding this newsletter.