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Science 31 August 2001:
Vol. 293. no. 5535, p. 1571
DOI: 10.1126/science.293.5535.1571b
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ScienceScope

An enigmatic new organization with the lofty goal of recording all 7 million to 100 million species on Earth within 25 years is gearing up now that it's hired a CEO. The new All Species Inventory chief, Brian Boom, formerly with The New York Botanical Garden, says the effort will be "organismal biology's equivalent to the human genome project."

Figure 1

CREDIT: NOAA

Launched last fall in California, the All Species project is backed by an intriguing alliance of science and tech figures, including prominent biologists, former Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand, and Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine (www.all-species.org). Organizers explain that it won't try to duplicate ongoing species inventories and database projects. Instead, "we're looking for the bottlenecks and the holes in funding," says Boom. He and others mention everything from genetic sampling to training lay taxonomists in developing countries.

The inventory has over a million dollars in start-up money, but it's now moving into a major fund-raising phase, Boom says. The goal is hundreds of millions of dollars, and he claims tentative commitments from unnamed tech industry donors. Planners expect to flesh out the project at a meeting next month in Mexico and another at Harvard in October chaired by biodiversity champions Peter Raven and E. O. Wilson.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)