QOTD

Setting all these reservations and biases aside, the total number of living organisms that have received Latin binomial names is currently around 1.5 million or so. Amazingly, there is as yet no centralized computer index of these recorded species. It says a lot about intellectual fashions, and about our values, that we have a computerized catalog entry, along with many details, for each of several million books in the Library of Congress but no such catalog for the living species we share our world with. Such a catalog, with appropriately coded information about the habitat, geographical distribution, and characteristic abundance of the species in question (no matter how rough or impressionistic), would cost orders of magnitude less money than sequencing the human genome; I do not believe such a project is orders of magnitude less important. Without such a factual catalog, it is hard to unravel the pattems and processes that determine the biotic diversity of our planet.

--Robert M. May, 1988, "How many species are there on Earth? doi:10.1126/science.241.4872.1441

Not much has changed in twenty years...