All living things, online

摘要

Taxonomy has an image problem. Perennially short of funding, its greying practitioners are seen as dry and dusty―just like the museums and herbaria in which many of them work. "People who do taxonomy are depicted as postage-stamp collectors," says Patrick Kociolek, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and an authority on the taxonomy of diatoms―algae that secrete cell walls made from glass. Repeated reports from concerned organizations have echoed Kociolek's observation, describing a discipline in seemingly inexorable decline. But hope may be at hand, in the form of initiatives that aim to reinvent taxonomy for the online generation. One project, called the Catalogue of Life, is taking firm steps to establish a federation of interoperable databases documenting the world's taxonomic knowledge. Another group, the AH Species Foundation, is even talking about naming and describing all living species within a single human generation. That would be an incredible feat. There is currently no consensus on the total number of species: estimates range from 4 million to 100 million. In the 250 years since the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus invented the modern taxonomic framework, roughly 1.7 million organisms have been named and formally described. And that information languishes in myriad journal articles, index cards, ancient books and museum collections.