As genomics and biomedicine are to human health, so ecology and conservation biology are to the planet's health. Unfortunately, compared with their sister disciplines, ecology and conservation biology are still disadvantaged. Their growth is hampered by a seldom-acknowledged deficiency: our ignorance of most of the world's biodiversity, particularly at the level of individual species, where knowledge is foundational to all other studies of diversity and hence of the whole living environment. The number of species given a scientific name is believed to fall between 1.5 million and 1.8 million. The true, full number, including those still undescribed, can only be guessed at to the nearest order of magnitude, with the opinion of many experts gravitating toward the vicinity of 10 million. Reliable biodiversity assessments are limited to a few relatively well-known groups, including the vascular plants, vertebrates, and a small number of invertebrates such as corals and butterflies. If the true number of species is about 10 million, these focal groups add up to fewer than 5% of the total. Bacteria, mites, nematode worms, fungi, beetles, and other major environmental players are necessarily ignored, or at best given "morphospecies" code numbers. Even among the small minority of all species diagnosed and named, fewer than 1% have been subject to the kind of careful biological studies needed to undergird ecology and conservation biology.
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