Taxonomists Launch A Grand Effort to Classify Every Species on Earth, With Your Help
Leptotyphlops carlae Blair Hedges, Penn State Taxonomists plan to catalogue all of the world's species in the next 50 years. This NASA-style initiative, set at the Sustain What? Conference held in New York City this week, will require the identification and classification of approximately 10 million new species. To put that in perspective, only 2 million have been catalogued since binomial nomenclature was first invented in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus. The botanists, zoologists, ecologists, and computer scientists present at the conference believe that a number of modern developments make such a feat feasible. One is the ability to organize information online. Digitization of information, they explained, keeps taxonomists from reinventing the wheel by re-classifying species that were previously catalogued in obscure places. "My productivity has increased by an order of magnitude in recent years because of the Internet," noted Dennis Stevenson, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden. The Internet...