The role of taxonomy in conserving biodiversity

No conservationist doubts that taxonomy is an essential tool for understanding biodiversity, as it provides the organising principle for thinking about this vast topic. Thus the reawakening of interest in this scientific discipline is very welcome. Two recent major scientific-technical advances will make taxonomy an even more useful tool for conservation in the coming years. The first advance has been in genetics, or rather genomics. The unravelling of the genetic code of numerous species, not least of them Homo sapiens, has made the previously-arcane science of genetics much more accessible. We soon will be able to determine the DNA of any species relatively quickly and inexpensively. Within a decade or so it may be simpler to extract enough sequence data from an individual organism to assign it to a “sequence cluster” (equivalent to species) than to key it out using traditional methods. DNA assessment through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has doubled the number of known major divisions within life’s two prokaryotic domains, Bacteria and Archaea (Boucher and Doolittle 2002). Just as bacterial taxonomy is now nearly all sequence-based, new ways of classifying insects, nematodes and perhaps even many plants and fish might be developed that are quite different from current taxonomy (Godfray, 2002). DNAbased taxonomy may provide new and unexpected insights into mammals and birds as well, for example the recent finding that the duck-billed platypus (an egg-laying mammal) is far more closely related to marsupials than was formerly thought (Penny and Hasegawa 1997). The second advance is in microchip-based information management, as Moore’s Law (which states that the storage capacity of microchips will double and the price will be reduced by half every 18 months) continues to hold. This means that a field biologist soon will be able to store all necessary taxonomic information on an inThe role of taxonomy in conserving biodiversity