April 13, 2007 An international effort to catalogue every known species has surpassed the one million mark.

Six years after the program began, the Catalogue of Life, as the list is known, has registered nearly 1,009,000 species and counting. Scientists hope to complete the project by 2011, indexing an estimated 1.75 million species.

The list will catalogue every known species on earth that has been identified and scientifically classified, said Thomas Orrell, co-director of the project. It includes everything from plants and animals to fungi and viruses.

“This list aims to be the first universal index for species identification,” said Orrell. “And it will be a list that everyone can take advantage of, from governments and industry to a school student writing a research report.”

The Catalogue of Life is a joint effort between Species 2000 and the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) and provides access to research culled from more than 47 taxonomic databases around the world.

The two organizations, which had been cataloguing species independent of each other, joined forces in 2001 after realizing their lists were beginning to overlap. Now, each year the organizations release a Catalogue of Life biological checklist. The annual report lists every species they have indexed so far, and is based on the work of more than 3,000 scientists worldwide.

Orrell, acting director of ITIS and a biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said the goal of the project is to have a dynamic checklist that is constantly being updated and available on the web.

“Taxonomy is fluid, and constantly changing,” said Orrell. “What we ultimately want is a list that is fluid too, with real-time updates and information.”

Orrell compares the need for a unified taxonomic list to the idea behind the first dictionaries.

“Before dictionaries, there was no resource you could go to in order to look up the spelling of a word in the English language or the definition of it,” he said. “Now there’s a bunch of dictionaries, Oxford, Webster’s, American Collegiate. Nothing like that first dictionary exists in taxonomy. This [list] is that starting point.”

He said the list will help scientists better understand the diversity of life in the world and provide an internationally available index that scientists can refer to for their research. Orrell explained that often, because some plants and animals have numerous common names, much of the information about a particular species goes missing.

“If a plant in one country is called one name, and it has a different name in another country, and you only know one of the names when you look it up, you won’t get all the information there is about it,” he said.

The list also hopes to resolve many of the discrepancies between scientists about particular species.

“Taxonomy is governed by a very strict set of rules,” said Orrell, “with both zoological and botanical codes that govern what is considered valid in terms of how you publish and give names to species, but the actual view of what is a valid species is largely based on opinion, which leads to discrepancies.”

Orrell praised the efforts of taxonomists around the world who were helping to identify the various species and said the completed list will be a huge milestone in the world of taxonomy, developed by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century.

“This list is really giving the first public outlet for the science of taxonomy since Linnaeus,” he said.

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