Unanimous Resolution on ALL Species Project Announced

San Francisco, October 17, 2001-- The ALL Species Inventory is an ambitious global initiative to identify and record every living species of life on Earth in the next 25 years. That's all species alive on the planet, in total numbers estimated between 7 and 100 million. Only a few percent of those have been discovered so far.

ALL Species Foundation announced today the unanimous resolution by the participants of the Megadiversity Countries Workshop held in Mexico City September 28-29, 2001 and the Summit for All Species held in Cambridge October 13-15, 2001. The Megadiversity Countries Workshop was convened by Dr. Jorge Soberon of CONABIO and sponsored by the ALL Species Foundation and the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International, was a gathering of representatives of 13 megadiverse nations. The Summit, convened in association with internationally renowned scientist and Pulitzer Prize winning author, Dr. E.O. Wilson, was a gathering of some of the major organizations and individuals involved in the attempt to record and describe all living organisms on earth. The conferences were aimed to c oordinate global inventory efforts, to share information on current and anticipated technologies, to accelerate systematics efforts, and to explore funding needs and opportunities.

The resolution summary as adopted by participants of both meetings follows:

To identify and classify every living species on Earth, including the large majority still undiscovered, and to inventory the complete diversity of life on our planet with a goal of completion within 25 years, hence a human generation. A complete exploration and assessment of the diversity of life on Earth will surely rank as one of the greatest and most necessary human achievements.

According to ALL Species Foundation CEO, Brian M. Boom, "The mission of ALL is to fund modern approaches to biodiversity research and training globally. It is an ambitious initiative to be sure, but doable thanks largely to recent and prospective innovations in biological informatics and genomics. We want to fund the best, most cutting-edge ideas to expedite what is really organismal biology's equivalent to the human genome project in terms of its scope, cost, and potential societal benefits."