SAN FRANCISCO-The ALL Species Foundation, whose mission is to enable the discovery of all life on Earth in 25 years, announces the first joint inventory program totaling approximately $14 million of new funds for discovery. Co-developed with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) the Planetary Biodiversity Inventories program is the first of its kind to invite teams of investigators to conduct a worldwide, species-level systematic inventory of an entire major group of organisms.

People alive today are the first humans to learn that a mass extinction event is imminent and may be the last generation with the opportunity to inventory much of our planet's biodiversity before it is forever gone. Because such broad knowledge will never again be achievable, the three organizations drafted a Memorandum of Understanding in August of 2002 endorsing development of a global biodiversity inventory. The new PBI program within NSF represents the culmination seven months of negotiations and concept development among the organizations.

"NSF has taken a great leap for science by funding the discovery of life on this planet. Our ignorance of other creatures on this world is immense and ALL Species applauds NSF for their forward role in our collective aim to discover the full diversity of life," says Kevin Kelly, Chair, ALL Species Foundation.

"The Planetary Biodiversity Inventories Program is a major step forward in the exploration of life on Earth. The knowledge acquired will have relevance for all disciplines of biology, for the management of the environment, and in countless other ways for the promotion of human welfare," says E.O.Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University.

There are numerous ways to conduct biotic inventories, from collection of all the species in a defined geographic area to a global collection of one major group. Despite two and a half centuries of biological investigation, only a few percent of the diversity of life on this planet has been identified. Were life to be discovered today on another planet, resources would quickly be mustered to inventory its entire diversity. Yet no model exists for how to complete an inventory of all the species of any major group.

"It's a really great start with new programmed funds for knowing important groups of species planet-wide. Global taxon taxonomic coverage is an important side of a two-headed nickel. Now we await revelations from the other side of the coin, which is to know ALL the species at any and all places on the Globe. When both sides of the coin are well funded, our ability as humans to better share the planet with other forms of life will come to fruition," says Terry Erwin, Science Board Chair, ALL Species Foundation.

No inventory 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. Projects funded within the program are expected to be ambitious, large-scale efforts that are multi-investigator, multi-institutional, and multi-national in scope and which crosscut disciplines, ecological space, and geologic time. These international teams can help provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the biotic history and current ecosystems of earth.

Projects 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 and completed within reasonable time frames. Target date for proposals is 10 January 2003. Assuming a sufficient number of high-quality proposals and the availability of funds, ca. 2-6 PBI awards with durations from 3-5 years will be made over the five-year period of the program. Because the oceans that dominate our planet are so seriously undersampled, at least one award will be targeted specifically to a marine group of organisms.

Why are such studies crucial? These inventories can provide a robust data set for establishing the most precise, informative language possible for biological communication and provide a conceptual framework for all of comparative biology. They can create a globally applicable system within which the distribution of species and their characteristics can be charted across ecological space and through geological time. They can generate rigorously tested knowledge accessible to everyone, everywhere, for research, education, and application. They can produce interactive keys, or other automated identification tools, that will enable non-specialists to identify accurately all the species of these taxonomic groups. If successful, these studies will provide models for workers on other groups to follow to complete similar inventories in years rather than centuries.