Working as a decentralized organization, the ALL Species Foundation is
pursuing the following initiatives with strategic partners and key advisors
during 2004:
Build Awareness for Discovery/Inventory
The ALL Species Governing and Science Boards, ALL Advisor Network, and
strategic partners will continue to promote the need for discovery and the
value of inventory, and to seek funding for these efforts.
E-Type /E-Description Initiative
ALL Species is gratified at the number of museums and individual researchers that are steadily creating web pages for
their taxa of interest and taking images of type specimens and making this information web accessible. We encourage more
organizations to follow their lead. Digitizing 50 percent of the primary type specimens and getting them online remains a
primary goal of ALL Species.
Planetary Biodiversity Inventories (PBI)
The ALL Governing Board will assist in generating funds for the PBI, a new
$14 Million NSF/ALL/Sloan program for 2 - 5 global inventories of major
taxonomic groups. ALL Species is committed to raise monies over the next
four years, and to provide scientific input for this joint initiative.
E-Type Starter Kit
In the interest of reaching out to small to medium size natural history collections in other parts of the world,
the David Rockefeller Fund supported the construction of the prototype E-Type Starter Kit, an A-Z primer about imaging types,
free software, with botanical and zoological protocols, etc. The E-Type Starter Kit launched (Jan 2004) in a beta version
through the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and we expect a feedback period of a few months to improve the value of
the Kit. After the feedback period, the final version will be made available online, through CDs and a paper version.
