The mission of Discover Life is to assemble and share knowledge in order to improve education, health, agriculture, economic development and conservation throughout the world.

Discover Life provides free on-line tools to identify species, share ways to teach and study nature's wonders, report findings, build maps, process images, and contribute to and learn from a growing encyclopedia of life that now has 1,214,171 species pages. Discover Life is under the auspices of the Polistes Foundation, whose scientific partners plan to add high-quality identification guides, maps, images, and text to these species pages by 2012.