Hunting species: not just a numbers game

In the race to describe all of Earth's species before they go extinct it has been suggested that one species that is thriving is taxonomists. Taxonomists are the people responsible for describing, identifying, and naming species - so far they have described around two million species. This could involve trekking into the jungle to discover new plants and animals but more often means poring over samples in existing collections and databases to unearth previously undescribed species. 'Taxonomic data, knowledge about species, underpins nearly every aspect of environmental biology including conservation, extinction, and the world's biodiversity hotspots,' explains Robert Scotland of Oxford University's Department of Plant Sciences. If you want to describe all Earth's species before they vanish then the question of the taxonomy community's capacity, and the speed with which they can discover new species, becomes very important. Some recent studies looking at trends in extinction counted the number of authors on each taxonomic paper and concluded that there was an expanding workforce of taxonomists chasing an ever diminishing pool of undescribed species. 'These findings contradict the prevailing view that there are six million species on Earth remaining to be discovered by an ever diminishing number of taxonomists, the so called 'taxonomic impediment',' Robert comments.