An ambitious goal to describe 10 million species in less than 50 years is achievable and necessary to sustain Earth’s biodiversity, according to an international group of 39 scientists, scholars and engineers who provided a detailed plan, including measures to build public support.

“Earth’s biosphere has proven to be a vast frontier that, even after centuries of exploration, remains largely uncharted,” wrote the authors, who include biodiversity crusaders Edward O. Wilson and Peter H. Raven.

“Exploring the biosphere is much like exploring the universe,” the authors argued. “The more we learn, the more complex and surprising the biosphere and its story turn out to be.”

By most estimates, about 2 million of Earth’s species are known, with about 18,000 new plants and animals discovered each year. Experts estimate at least 10 million species on Earth are yet to be discovered or accurately classified. These species are tiny, large, buried, hidden in collections, or in plain sight.

Raven, President Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden, has said that roughly 30 percent of Earth’s species will become extinct this century. He and the other co-authors pointed out: “For the first time in human history, the rate of species extinction may exceed that of species discovery.”

“The time is ripe for a comprehensive mission to explore and document Earth’s species. Charting the biosphere is enormously complex, yet necessary expertise can be found through partnerships with engineers, information scientists, sociologists, ecologists, climate scientists, conservation biologists, industrial project managers and taxon specialists, from agrostologists to zoophytologists,” noted the authors of a Systematics and Biodiversity journal article, “Mapping the biosphere; exploring species to understand the origin, organization and sustainability of biodiversity” (free download).

“From the 18th century until our appreciation for the pace of biodiversity loss, it seemed that we could make do with fractional knowledge of Earth’s species. It is now clear that this was a tragic miscalculation,” said Quentin Wheeler, the lead author. Wheeler is an entomologist and director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University (ASU).

Disappearing knowledge

“The pace of environmental change and species extinctions indicates that we need a comprehensive inventory of species and we need it now. Without exploring, describing and classifying Earth’s species we may miss many of our best opportunities to learn from natural selection how to solve countless problems related to our own sustainable survival,” said Wheeler, who also is a senior sustainability scientist at ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability and a professor in the School of Sustainability.

“A fuller understanding of biodiversity explains not only which species exist in nature, but also how they are interrelated to each other, genealogically and geographically, and how they interact with each other,” said co-author, Marcelo R. de Carvalho, a professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

The authors also noted that a generation of experts in fauna and flora is retiring, without transferring their knowledge to new generations.

“In 2012, we are facing an unprecedented crisis and have unprecedented opportunities,” stressed co-author Johannes Vogel, director of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany. “The world is in an extinction crisis, at the same time, we have all the intellectual and technological capacity for rapid biodiversity discovery – combining the power of science, industry and society for a most noble cause: discovering and understanding the planet we inhabit,” he said.

“The ultimate goal of the proposed mission is to know every species; to learn what makes each unique, from its anatomy to its genome, behaviour, ecological associations, geographic and seasonal distributions and phylogenetic relationships,” the authors wrote.

The authors proposed building on more than 250 years of species exploration by tapping a workforce of taxon experts, and the public, and leveraging recent technological advances to accomplish this goal. The authors also seek to create open access to research resources.

They noted that an estimated 3 billion specimens are held in collections in botanical gardens, natural history museums and universities. “This is a profoundly powerful scientific research resource,” the authors wrote. “As a museum-specific cyberinfrastructure is envisioned and engineered, it is reasonable to predict a time in the not-too-distant future when all collections become nodes in a global network that functions as if it were one vast, distributed ‘museum’ accessible to all.”

Ref.: Q. D. Wheeler, et al., Mapping the biosphere: exploring species to understand the origin, organization and sustainability of biodiversity, Systematics and Biodiversity; 2012; [DOI:10.1080/14772000.2012.665095] (open access)