Concerned scientists call for list of all living things

The world urgently needs a comprehensive inventory of all living things, comparable to the astronomers' catalogue of the stars, two of Britain's leading scientists said yesterday.

Without one, the fight to save increasingly threatened wildlife will be handicapped, Lord May of Oxford, President of the Royal Society, and Professor John Lawton, Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, said.

One of the problems, the two men said at a briefing in London on the future for biodiversity, is that taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying living things, has come to seem old-fashioned and so too little effort and too few resources are going into it.

"We have the human genome and we have space exploration, but we still don't have a half-decent list of all the organisms on the planet," Professor Lawton said. "It would possibly take a decade and a very concentrated research effort, but it's potentially doable. We still haven't the faintest idea, for example, which is the most species-rich group ... Some people think it's insects, but it might be nematode worms."

Far too little is known about smaller creatures such as micro-organisms, the two men said. "A lot of money is spent on research into mammals and birds, but we need to know what is most important for the continuance of the ecosystem on which we depend," Lord May said. "Arguably it's the little things that run the world."

Without a proper catalogue, it will also not be possible to measure the rate at which species are being lost. "There are parts of the world where animals and plants are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, and over most of the globe the variety of life is being severely eroded by human activity," Professor Crane said."

The Royal Society announced it was setting up a special working group to study biodiversity loss. The group, chaired by Professor Peter Crane, head of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, will publish its findings next year.