The audit is being carried out in partnership with the UK National Inventory of War Memorials, a national database of war memorials administered by the Imperial War Museum and English Heritage.
As people spend more time on Google's search site looking through its extensive "entity" database, there would also be more pages, or inventory, on which to place ads, said a person with knowledge of the initiative.
"This database provides an example of how other biologists could similarly collaborate to collectively produce an inventory of all life on Earth, " Appeltans says.