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Biodiversity: Species, All Inclusive
Imagine doctors operating on patients without a thorough knowledge of human anatomy. How many problems would they miss? How many mistakes would they make?
It may sound absurd in this modern age, and yet this is the situation currently facing the world’s ecologists and biologists. In the 250 years since Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus first started the task of formally cataloguing species, fewer than 2 million of the estimated 10 million to 100 million species in the world have been documented.
Most well known are the mammals, with most species identified and at least a basic amount of information known about them — though as recently as last year a new species of elephant was discovered in Africa. Least well known are probably bacteria, with about 4,000 of an estimated 1 million or more species identified. Of an estimated 400,000 viruses alone, only about 4,000 have been identified. At the moment, it is as if the book of life — the book that tells us who we are and where we came from — is missing not only major chapters, but entire sections.
In response to this information gap, a diverse group of prominent scientists and business people established in 2000 the non-profit All Species Foundation, launching one of the most ambitious scientific agendas of the new century — and perhaps all time. Their goal — along the lines of the Human Genome Project, which aims to map and decode the 30,000 to 35,000 individual genes that make humans human — is to map and identify all species from microbes to mammals in the next 25 years. Ultimately, the project’s founders, which include Nobel Prize winning biologist Edward O. Wilson, Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly and forty other prominent individuals, envision a free, publicly accessible database with, in effect, a Web page for every species.
Achieving such an ambitious goal within a human generation, however, will require navigating many logistical hurdles. Currently, the world’s taxonomic projects -- those that name, identify and organize species -- are scattered and incomplete. Significant backlogs of undocumented specimens already collected exist in museums and other facilities around the world, including, legend has it, undocumented species collected by Charles Darwin. Other challenges include inadequate budgets, archaic collecting techniques, limited storage capacities and a shortage of qualified taxonomists. There are perhaps 6,000 to10,000 such scientists globally according to Wilson and others.
The All Species Foundation plans to address these challenges in different ways. They plan to enlist the support and cooperation of scientific organizations around the world. Private philanthropists and organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank will be asked to help underwrite efforts. They will use cutting-edge technological tools to speed up the collecting process and reduce costs. This includes employing pattern-recognition software to separate known and unknown species, using Global Positioning System receivers for locating undiscovered species from coral reefs to rain forest canopies and establishing a globally accessible database. It is hoped that such methods will help bring down the costs of species identification from the current $2,000 a species to a few hundred dollars. Contracts will also be awarded to train ‘parataxonomists’ -- non-scientists trained in specimen collecting techniques -- in all corners of the globe. At the same time, professional scientists will be asked to lead expeditions and work on specimen backlogs. By 2007, the All Species Foundation hopes to quadruple the pace of species identification to 60,000 from the current 15,000 a year.
Despite these challenges and high cost -- an estimated $3 billion to $5 billion overall -- potential returns are promising. Such an inventory offers an untapped goldmine of information from serving as an early warning system for the emergence of new viruses to revealing new natural resources useful in medicine and other industries to helping guide new research in areas as diverse as cancer cures and agriculture.
At a time when the rate of species extinction is rapidly accelerating -- equaling roughly 100 species a day according to some calculations -- the foundation also feels the inventory is especially urgent. Complete knowledge of species is key to understanding ecosystems and how they change and to preserving biodiversity, scientists say. "More than just buying land and conserving habitat, we have to have more knowledge of what we are trying to save since everything is co-dependent on each other," says Kelly, now serving as the chairman of the foundation. "The more knowledge we have of what we are trying to save, the better we are able to protect it and take care of it."
