Taxonomy that matters: response to Bacher

Letters there are in different taxa, it is probably impossible to estimate rates of species extinction in poorly known speciose taxa. This makes it difficult to develop reasonable conservation priorities [6] and certainly impossible to quantify their effectiveness. Taxonomists may not be dying out, and their numbers may even be rising exponentially, but this does not mean that taxonomy is not in crisis. Even though taxonomists have continually adopted modern technological advances, the per-capita rates of species description did not increase over the last 60–70 years. We still need to describe species at a much faster rate than we currently do; we still need more taxonomists. Acknowledgements Comments by Stuart Pimm are gratefully acknowledged.

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2 Godfray, H.C.J. (2002) Challenges for taxonomy. Nature 417, 17–19 3 Gaston, K.J. and May, R.M. (1992) Taxonomy of taxonomists. Nature 356, 281–282 4 Hopkins, G.W. and Freckleton, R.P. (2002) Declines in the numbers of amateur and professional taxonomists: implications for conservation. Anim. Conserv. 5, 245–249 5 Joppa, L.N. et al. (2011) The population ecology and social behaviour of taxonomists. Trends Ecol. Evol. 26, 551–553 6 Joppa, L.N. et al. (2011) How many species of flowering plants are there? Proc. R. Soc. B 278, 554–559 7 Noyes, J. (2001) Interactive Catalogue of World Chalcidoidea, (2nd edn), Taxapad and The Natural History Museum, (Vancouver) 8 Yu, D.S. et al. (2005) World Ichneumonoidea. Taxonomy, Biology, Morphology and Distribution, Taxapad 9 Hamilton, A.J. et al. (2010) Quantifying uncertainty in estimation of tropical arthropod species richness. Am. Nat. 176, 90–95 10 Gaston, K.J. (1991) The magnitude of global insect species richness. Conserv. Biol. 5, 283–296 11 Dirzo, R. and Raven, P.H. (2003) Global state of biodiversity and loss. Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 28, 137–167

References 1 Solow, A. and Smith, W. (2005) On estimating the number of species from the discovery record. Proc. R. Soc. B 272, 285–287

0169-5347/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.11.003 Trends in Ecology and Evolution, February 2012, Vol. 27, No. 2

Taxonomy that matters: response to Bacher Lucas N. Joppa1, David L. Roberts2 and Stuart L. Pimm3 1

Microsoft Research, 7 J.J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0FB, UK Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Marlowe Building, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NR, UK 3 Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Box 90328, Durham, NC 27708, USA 2

We delight in Bacher [1] sharing our passion for the disarmingly simple, yet significant question: ‘How many species are there?’ By applying our mechanistic model [2] to two hugely diverse, yet surely poorly known, insect taxa, he saves us the task. His result mirrors some selected plant taxa [2] and geographical regions [3] where there is only weak evidence for a decline in the numbers of species described per taxonomist. Bacher suggests that: ‘We still need to describe species at a much faster rate than we currently do; we still need more taxonomists.’ We agree. The issue is where should that effort be concentrated and how can efficiency be increased? Describing every species is the noble goal of efforts such as the Tree of Life (http://tolweb.org/tree/), Census for Marine Life (http://www.coml.org/) and All Taxa Biodiversity Initiative (http://www.dlia.org/atbi/). Given the many species missing from the taxonomic record, achieving this goal will probably take decades. In the meantime, there is an urgent need for taxonomy that matters. Current extinction rates [4] mean that there are species today that will never be discovered. As with flowering plants, missing species generally are likely to be in currently recognized biodiversity hotspots, which are places under extreme threat, and where local taxonomic capacity is limited. Missing species are usually rare: surprisingly large fractions of even well-known taxa with small ranges are recent discoveries [5]. Focusing taxonomic effort in these areas would be prudent. Corresponding author: Pimm, S.L. ([email protected]).

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Embracing new technologies could make a huge difference to knowing where species live, which is important in itself and vital to understanding the geographical variation of species. Citizen scientists, using clever technologies such as smartphone applications, can rapidly accumulate data that could quickly rival museum databases in the quantity of georeferenced material. For example, iNaturalist (http://www.inaturalist.org) is an online initiative where users post pictures of species and interact with expert taxonomists to resolve species identification. One of the projects of iNaturalist, the Global Amphibian BioBlitz, quickly harnessed these citizen scientists to collect georeferenced picture specimens of approximately 90% of the amphibian families of the world (11% of species) in just a few months. Some yet-to-be-identified specimens are probably ones that are new to science. References 1 Bacher, S. (2012) Still not enough taxonomists: reply to Joppa et al. Trends Ecol. Evol. 27, 65–66 2 Joppa, L.N. et al. (2011) How many species of flowering plants are there? Proc. R. Soc. B 278, 554–559 3 Joppa, L.N. et al. (2011) Biodiversity hotspots house most undiscovered plant species. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108, 13171–13176 4 Pimm, S.L. et al. (1995) The future of biodiversity. Science 269, 347–350 5 Pimm, S.L. et al. (2010) How many endangered species remain to be discovered in Brazil? Nat. Conserv. 8, 71–77 0169-5347/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.11.015 Trends in Ecology and Evolution, February 2012, Vol. 27, No. 2