The Vision: Knowing all Earth's Species
In the tradition of taxonomy for the past 250 years, "if you don’t have a name you don’t have knowledge; if you
have the wrong name, you have the wrong knowledge." Phylogenic and ecological studies, detailed DNA analyses,
applied agriculture and forestry, medical biology and conservation strategies are all critically important efforts,
however, at this pivotal moment in history it is essential that humankind record the basic natural history information
about life on Earth before that life disappears and that means getting all species named and catalogued. Accessing
natural history information about species requires that each have a name upon which the information is hinged.
Mission Statement
ALL is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to funding the discovery, description, and naming of all extant
species on the planet. While the ultimate goal of ALL is the preservation of species diversity and its underlying
processes, what distinguishes ALL from other organizations is that its expertise is devoted to exploration, discovery,
and documentation. This activity is fundamental to science, conservation, bioprospecting, ecotourism, agriculture, etc. —
enormous endeavors that already have strong advocates. However, no other coordinated group is filling the exploration and
discovery niche on a global scale today. The information discovered and gathered will be freely shared with the world
community, including scientific organizations, governments, universities, schools, and local and regional communities
through a Web-based dynamic "Encyclopedia of Life on Earth."
Core values of ALL
The ALL initiative must honor discovery, help make taxonomic scientific inquiry prestigious, honor the scientists and explorers, respect all life, value community participation, and value knowledge and the quest for education. In essence, it should reflect the core values of the project and an international, multi-disciplinary board should ultimately identify the core values. ALL needs a compelling, honestly told narrative to endure.
- Above reproach, highest ethical standards
- High level science, peer reviewed, scientific review of programs
- Exploration and utilization of new technology through time
- Citizen involvement
- Universality, the whole earth, all countries, all species, and all nations are equal
- Dedicated to sustainable capacity building in developing world
- Training people at all levels from parataxonomists to technicians to PhD’s
- Equitable and global sharing of benefits
- Open access to ALL information
Defining an All Species Inventory: What is ALL, Why All, Reaching All
Conceptually, an all species inventory forms the underpinning of scientific inquiry from which
add-on-value will follow. Currently, ecology and conservation spring from a woefully incomplete foundation of
knowledge -- "thin ice" to borrow E.O. Wilson’s description. Naming all the species on the planet will finally
form a solid and organized foundation of knowledge upon which evolutionary and ecological studies can build,
and upon which conservation strategies can rely.
Why all?
Because all is mythic, inclusive, and challengingly elusive. It captures the human imagination.
The idea of all encompasses all species, all life, all geographic locations, and all nations. Even the idea of proposing to discover all has the power to change people’s perceptions about the value of biodiversity and the importance of the living earth itself. All has that shoot-for-the-moon, larger-than-life,
over-the-top inspiring quality about it -- and has been the time-honored dream of taxonomists and natural historians.
Reaching all:
Scientifically, all is recognized as a finite number of evolved species at some point in time,
‘the present’ for example. All is an existing number of species on the earth at any given point in time.
That number is finite, and in the language of ALL, all means discovering and naming that finite number.
Practically, all is defined through reaching an asymptote on a species accumulation curve.
Magnitude of Project
Areas of knowledge, ignorance
Currently, an estimated 1.7 million species names have been applied to forms of life on Earth.
A small percentage of these names are duplicates for the same species (synonyms). Taxonomists know
that in museum and herbarium collections around the world, where some 1 billion plus specimens reside,
there are hundreds of thousands of undescribed species. And field biologists know that the number will
grow dramatically with further exploration, discovery, and documentation.
Is it even possible to define to an order of magnitude the scope of the ALL project?
No, but it will be huge by all accounts. Taxonomists don’t know even within one to two orders of
magnitude how many species there are. In the year 2000, exploration is still the key
word in species and microhabitat discovery. New techniques have and will continue to open unexplored biotic
zones -- deep sea floor, continental shelves, tropical forest canopies, tropical soils. Through the
exploration of these zones, hundreds of thousands (or millions) of new species will be described. Even plants are
still not well known; estimates suggest we have named only about 75% of the world’s plants. Animal and plant
collections in museums and herbaria are also not well known, but with in-depth study of museum collections this
promises to be a good source of new species discovery, especially for those species whose habitats may have been
destroyed during the 19th and 20th Century. Thus, exploration is also a key word in museum collections. Micro fungi,
soil nematodes, bacteria, and viruses, for example, are woefully unknown. The employment of new technology may be
critically important in these groups that will undoubtedly account for millions of new species discoveries.
Time Line
The thrill of exploration, the joy of discovery, and the quest to increase humanity’s
knowledge about species is nothing new, but the idea of completing it in 25 years is a
new vision. And the idea of pulling taxonomists out of obscurity and into public view is
also rather revolutionary for a discipline that is characterized more by shyness than celebrity.
But, by truly honoring scientists and scientific discovery, ALL could fast track human awareness of Earth’s
unknown species and engender a sorely needed respect for all life. With such an initiative, perhaps the world
will begin to see why naturalists should be honored as nature’s champions, and thereby champions of all life,
including our own.
Historical Difficulties and future hurdles
Taxonomists are often tied to their desks spending much of their time supporting their institutions in
administrative functions, all the while wishing they had more time to do taxonomy or train new taxonomists
or spend time in the field. Encumbered nomenclature procedures, a dawdling peer review system, incomplete data
in historic collections, understaffed natural history museums worldwide, the legacy of a 250 year old entrenched
academic system, little infusion of new technology, and too few technicians to aid in the crucial processes of
sorting and mounting specimens are all part of the "legacy" of taxonomy.
The number of specimens that can be collected per person-hour varies by taxonomic group, location,
methodology, and collecting expertise. In some regions of mega-diversity, a skilled collector can amass 10s of 1000s of
specimens in a day. But the material may not be sorted for years or even decades because of a scarcity of trained
technicians. A defined avenue of apprenticeship must be developed and local taxonomic institutions built in host
countries to provide workspace and subsequently house specimens.
ALL must find a substitute for the traditional working model whereby it takes 5-7 years to begin publishing
on major field collections and perhaps longer for getting an opportunity to visit museums in which type specimens
are housed. Streamlining the process will give taxonomists more time for synthesizing information about the species.
ALL will actively explore new technologies for finding, collecting, classifying, and cataloging
specimens to overcome a myriad of bottlenecks while maintaining the integrity of taxonomic science.
To insure scientific accuracy, a streamlined peer review mechanism can be designed, along with a new naming and
registration paradigm to unclog the current and slow system steeped in 250 years of academic tradition.
Organizational structure
Developing local and regional capacity
Too few taxonomists, too many species, and too few students mean a desperate need for capacity building.
Increased global capacity, created at the local level, from parataxonomist to Ph.D., is essential in the quest to
inventory all. Bottlenecks at all steps of the taxonomic process hamper the goal of reaching all, and the 25-year
clock is ticking. So is the biological clock of older taxonomists whose knowledge is irreplaceable until it is more
efficiently passed onto another generation of students (and computerized Expert Systems, such as the USDA Fruit Fly Project).
Building sustainable institutes in host countries that can provide long-term employment for newly skilled nationals
is part of the mission of ALL. The Web will allow expertise sharing across the world, but ALL will have to coordinate
the project globally, while building capacity locally.
Case studies
Best practices and case studies are important to study. Some of the organizations ALL might cooperate with,
particularly for proven best practices include, Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, ABRS, INBio,
Humboldt Institute and CANABIO, among others.
Case studies, particularly when things go wrong, are equally important to study. Reasons sighted for project
frustrations or failures include: too narrowly focused by region or by taxonomic group; funding for pure taxonomic
research was difficult to find 15 years ago; bureaucratic interference; failure to utilize technology; not enough
experts; wrong successors; poor management; incomplete funding; lack of leadership vision and commitment.
Technology
The importance of taxonomy coming up-to-speed on information technology for cataloging and sharing information,
bioinformatics, was universally accepted at the ALL meeting. However, the building of technological infrastructure
in countries rich in biodiversity will present a costly challenge to making the dream of real-time systems work.
The systematic use of genetic technology appears less immediate. Everyone agreed that tissue samples should be stored
for each species, so that when molecular systematists can efficiently and cost effectively work with the data, DNA
would be available.
Beyond a globally shared database with high quality digital images, ALL must also provide Expert Systems for the
identification of specimens. These technologies already exist; they are simply under funded vis-à-vis taxonomy.
Partners
Political, social, scientific, academic, financial, organizational, and technological barriers will need to be
addressed to accomplish this truly noble task. The question is simply, how? How do the players across a complex
international community carry out a task that promises to be far more politically and perhaps eventually more
technically complex than even the Human Genome Project?
What is needed is an international, collaborative, concerted effort by the world’s taxonomic community with
direct, yet decentralized involvement of nations, regions, local communities, citizens, and established
organizations already engaged in taxonomic inventories to discover, name, and catalog all species — validating the
names in print, as is mandated by International Codes of Nomenclature — and share data and images across cyberspace.
Building trust and overcoming easy-suspicion of bio-imperialism by people of developing nations will be political challenges, but easier to accomplish and maintain if ALL adheres to the strictest ethical standards, consciously remains above reproach, and actively watches for highly unpredictable second-order effects that are likely in an initiative of this scale. Partnering with organizations already established in countries like Mexico, Costa Rica, and Australia would be part of ALL’s collaborative approach. Building sustainable local capacity where it does not exist -- including educational, technological, and institutional capacities -- is essential to accomplishing ALL’s mission. But this will be time consuming, expensive, and will require local ownership in the project. Local training programs for all levels -- curators, technicians, and parataxonomists -- must be developed and managed by the world’s leading taxonomists to insure that specimen based
collecting methods are systematic and efficient. Sustaining the credibility of the science is paramount in the quest for knowing all Earth’s species. ALL is, and must remain, a purely
scientific organization with no political agenda.
Products/Services
- Permanent collections that voucher temporal and geographical occurrences of species
- Warding specimens for new age technologies
- Publications that validate scientific names
- Web-based encyclopedia of Earth’s species
- Web-based Expert System facility to identify Earth’s species
- Repatriation of specimen data
- Developing local and regional taxonomic capacity on a global basis
- Training local and regional taxonomic technicians, students and parataxonomists
- Stimulating development of new age taxonomic technology
Funding
The ALL target for funding is mainly the private wealth generated by the New Economy and through strategic partnerships.
One estimate of the cost to inventory all the species is $2 billion per year for 25 years; this estimate was based on
the traditional academic way of doing things versus contracts, endowments, and focused products, which we will explore.
Next steps
High-Tech Gurus and Active Taxonomists
Convene a meeting of leaders in a diverse array of high tech fields —nanotechnology, robotics,
medical imaging, aerospace, etc — along with active taxonomists. The taxonomists can explain to the techies
what they need and the techies can identify what technologies already exist that could make the taxonomists’ work
easier and more efficient both in the museum and the field. At the same time, the active taxonomists can begin to
review and create new rigorous and efficient collecting and information systems in light of what is learned from the
tech meeting. [Terry Erwin and Douglas Siegel-Causey]
Introduce ALL Internationally
This will be a meeting of representatives of about 15 institutions from Latin America,
Africa and southeast Asia, with a handful of other participants from CBD, GEF, major world museums,
ALL people, etc. [Jorge Soberon]
Convene a Meeting of Microbiologists
It was suggested that ALL convene a meeting of Microbiologists to discuss the feasibility
and implications of including in the inventory the myriad of microscopic life requiring very special
technology for collecting, storing, and studying.
Feasibility Study
Rodrigo Gamez, INBio, volunteered to create a feasibility study with cost analysis, etc, for Costa
Rica as a potential model, using Terry Erwin’s ALL plan which was passed out to the attendees at the meeting.
Online global resources and potential partners lists
ALL should generate online global resources and potential partners lists to organize the information about who
is doing what where and to get a better sense of their strengths and limitations. This includes
identifying the taxonomists, worldwide, who could actually contribute to the ALL project. In addition, ALL needs to Identify
country-by-country barriers to the ALL project, such as research and collecting restrictions imposed by many
counties (permits, security problems, etc. [Ron McGinley has suggested to ALL how this might be accomplished]
Identify the ongoing inventory efforts worldwide
What are their goals, who are the contact people, etc. This will be an effort to provide ALL with an analysis
of various organizations (organizational structure, pros/cons assessment, etc.). [Joel Cracraft]
Pilot Projects
Mentioned, but not elaborated was the need for ALL to establish some 4 or 5 pilot projects in order to learn by actually
doing, all the while being aware of past successes and failures as the pilot projects are designed and implemented.
Create Board of Directors/ Organizational Structure
ALL needs to create an organizational structure that draws internationally from scientists, framers, and
funders with scientific and political importance. ALL needs to attract a high-cache, international board and
begin a search for a Chief Executive Officer.
