Catalogue of Life

The participants of the ambitous 'Catalogue of Life' programme have been meeting in Malta in the past days to discuss the progress made in the project that aims to catalogue all life forms on earth by the year 2011. The meeting in Malta about the project named Species 2000 coincided with the Species 2000 Europa Annual Meeting. The Independent Sunday (United Kingdom) reports:

A project that is attempting nothing less than to compile a list of every living organism on Earth is making what it describes as "spectacular progress" in a world which is still discovering scores of new species every week.

The Catalogue of Life has just logged its 500,000th species, which may sound a lot, but the partly British-led project has a long way to go. Around 1.75m species have been identified somewhere on Earth, and this is a fraction of the estimated total. Even the most conservative experts put the number at five million, and some say that as many as 10 times as many different species may inhabit the land, seas and skies.

It is this colossal hole in human knowledge that the Catalogue of Life programme addresses. It began in 2001 as a joint venture between Species 2000, based at the University of Reading, and ITIS, based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and aims to complete the listing of life on Earth by 2011. Speaking from the project's annual conference in Malta yesterday, one of its founders, Professor Frank Bisby of Reading University said: "It is like a telephone book listing all organisms and where..

About Species 2000

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