National Science Foundation (NSF)

On Sept 30, 2002 an agreement was signed between the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and ALL Species Foundation to mutually develop a joint cooperative program on Planetary Biodiversity Inventories.

This fund, will be awarded over a five-year period, to two-to-six all-biota inventories of major taxa, to demonstrate the feasibility of accomplishing global surveys within reasonable time frames. Proposals may target any particular group of organisms, from terrestrial, fresh-water, or marine habitats, at any feasible level in the taxonomic hierarchy, but must be global in scope.

No projects of this magnitude have ever been attempted; these would provide the first rigorous models for answering global-scale questions with anything more than geographically arbitrary fragments of information. Each will require significant resources over a sustained period, depending on the size of the group, available expertise, and the current state of knowledge. Because the oceans that dominate our planet are so seriously under-sampled, at least one award will be targeted specifically to a marine group of organisms.

Projects for Planetary Biodiversity Inventories are expected to be ambitious, large-scale efforts that are multi-investigator, multi-institutional, and multi-national in scope. Each project will be expected to conduct the fieldwork necessary to fill gaps in existing collections, to produce descriptions, revisions, web pages, and interactive keys (or other automated identification tools) for all new and known species in the targeted group, to analyze their phylogenetic relationships, and to establish predictive classifications for them. Assuming a sufficient number of high-quality proposals and the availability of funds, we anticipate making ca. 2-6 PBI awards, with durations from 3-5 years, totaling about $14 million over the five-year period.

Please see link below for further details:

Conservation International (CI)