Can We Name Earth's Species Before They Go Extinct?

By Mark John Costello, R. May, Nigel E. Stork. Science, 2013

618 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5acec2f85154cd53d589c9ab8ef070ee1156ac63

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Citations in the corpus

Inordinate Fondness Multiplied and Redistributed: the Number of Species on Earth and the New Pie of Life (2017, background): “…extent to which they explicitly consider cryptic species, from including estimates of cryptic species richness based on expert opinion (Appeltans et al. 2012) to a brief discussion of the topic (Scheffers et al. 2012; Stork et al. 2015) to no mention at all (Mora et al. 2011; Costello et al. 2013).”
Worldwide Analysis of Sedimentary DNA Reveals Major Gaps in Taxonomic Knowledge of Deep-Sea Benthos (2016, background): “Based on the rate at which new taxonomic descriptions are being published, it has been proposed recently that most biodiversity on Earth might be described in the relatively near future (e.g., Appeltans et al., 2012; Costello et al., 2013).”
A global parasite conservation plan (2020, background): “biology is that saving species requires naming them (Costello et al., 2013).”
Soil fauna and soil functions: a jigsaw puzzle (2014, background): “However, at least for certain soil organisms, much work remains to be done in this field to reconcile species synonyms, which might take long time as result of the low accessibility to many species descriptions (Costello et al., 2013).”
Open Nomenclature in the biodiversity era (2016, background): “Largescale data bases for specimens, taxa and taxon names are in continuous development (Parr et al. 2012; Costello et al. 2013).”
Patterns, Causes, and Consequences of Anthropocene Defaunation (2016, background): “…programs to catalog animal species on the planet have given us a needed boost in the race to describe animal fauna before they become extinct, but a great deal of work remains [Costello et al. 2013; see also the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) registry at http://www.marinespecies.org/].”
Pollinator Diversity: Distribution, Ecological Function, and Conservation (2017, background): “At the present time we do not have an accurate estimate of the diversity of multicellular life on Earth to even an order of magnitude, with published figures ranging from 2 to 100 million, though lower estimates are probably more realistic (Costello et al. 2013).”
Acoustic indices for biodiversity assessments: Analyses of bias based on simulated bird assemblages and recommendations for field surveys (2015, neutral): “In addition, the sampling and identification of different taxa depend on a high degree of expert taxonomic knowledge; even a drastic increase in the number of taxonomists might not meet this demand for expertise (Costello et al., 2013).”
The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection (2014, background): “Many species will have gone or be going extinct before description (8, 15).”
Tree of Life Reveals Clock-Like Speciation and Diversification (2014, background): “32(4):835–845 doi:10.1093/molbev/msv037 Advance Access publication March 3, 2015 835 eukaryotes (Costello et al. 2013), and the proportion is similar (99.7”
Seven Shortfalls that Beset Large-Scale Knowledge of Biodiversity (2015, background): “The currently high rates of species and population extinctions are particularly important in this respect, as a reduction in global biodiversity truncates the shortfalls (see Costello et al. 2013), which are also partially alleviated by the much slower process of cladogenesis.”
Hitting the right target: taxonomic challenges for, and of, plant invasions (2013, background): “more species than ever before, as inferred from new databases showing that the number of taxonomists is increasing faster than the rate of species descriptions (Costello et al. 2013; but see Smith et al. 2008b)? Joppa et al.”
Fifty years on: Lessons from marine reserves in New Zealand and principles for a worldwide network (2014, background): “Major discoveries continue apace, proving there is still much to learn (e.g. Appeltans et al., 2012; Costello et al., 2013a,b,c).”
Sampling biases shape our view of the natural world (2020, background): “…and career recognition of data generation could all greatly enhance data availability for other taxa from more-diverse and less-accessible areas and facilitate the sharing of the data needed to understand global biodiversity patterns (Costello et al. 2013b, 2015b, La Sorte and Somveille 2019).”