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https://theprogressnetwork.substack.com/p/a-golden-age-of-biodiversity-science>
"We all know that Earth’s biodiversity is under pressure. The share of species
at risk of extinction keeps rising as we continue to chop down trees and dig up
soil to cultivate crops or build infrastructure. And of course, the
consequences of climate change loom large.
What we know less about is what that biodiversity actually entails. Despite
sharing a home with these critters, scientists estimate that we’ve classified
only about 14% of the world’s species —
at best. The numbers of what remains
unknown to us are staggering: an estimated 100,000 plant species, for example,
and two million fungal ones, not to mention all the different bacteria, of
which there may be trillions unidentified.
And because we can’t save what we don’t know, comprehensive cataloguing is an
ever-more-urgent task.
The good news is that it’s incredibly exciting times for biodiversity science.
Thanks to digital tools and other technological advances, we are learning more
about life on our planet, and faster, than ever before. And that knowledge may
prove to be the key to saving it.
For a long time, the peak of new species’ discovery was considered to be over a
century ago, when colonial powers were still shipping off naturalists to
traipse around the Global South. But a recent study found that between 2015 and
2020, scientists described new species at the fastest rates recorded in the
history of modern taxonomy, at more than 16,000 per year. So many animals,
insects (particularly beetles), fish (bony ones, to be specific), and
arthropods—invertebrates with segmented bodies and jointed appendages, like
crabs—were identified that the study’s authors estimate that up to a fifth of
our total knowledge of these creatures had been accumulated in the previous two
decades alone.
Much of this is the result of DNA sequencing becoming affordable; the cost has
plummeted from tens of millions of dollars in the early 2000s to just a few
hundred today. We’re also plumbing regions of the planet that we’ve never
studied before, from the highlands of Angola, which had been made inaccessible
for decades by war, to the depths of the sea, where only state-of-the-art
robots can go.
Identification of new flora hasn’t accelerated in the same way, holding fairly
steady at about 2,500 species per year. But that, too, could be about to
change. In their just-released
State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2026,
scientists at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are hopeful that a
combination of digitization and AI is about to transform plant taxonomy."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
