Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

The Barcode Blog

A mostly scientific blog about short DNA sequences for species identification and discovery. I encourage your commentary. -- Mark Stoeckle

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World species census updated

How many species are there? One widely cited estimate, now 24 years old, is 1.7 million named species (EO Wilson 1985  Science 230:1227). This estimate is updated in detailed form in September 2009 publication from Australian Government “Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World, 2nd edition” by Arthur Chapman (illustrated report open access for perusing online or as pdf for download). According to Chapman’s analysis, there are 1.9 million published species in the world. Approximately 18,000 new species are described each year, 75% of which are invertebrates, 11% vascular plants, and 7% vertebrates. Chapman estimates the true number of world species is about 11 million. The largest uncertainties, for which it is estimated fewer than 10% of species have been named, are for fungi, single-celled eukaryotes (protocista, cyanophyta, chromista), and “prokaryotes”, i.e. eubacteria and archaea.

chapman

This overview brings to mind pictures of the distribution of matter and dark matter in the universe. On a large scale, is the “density” of species uniform? For example, given there about about 10,000 bird and about 40,000 fish species, do fish take up 4x as much diversity space? We know on a small scale there are some “high-density” closely-related groups of species, like cichlid fishes in Africa, but can we map the distribution of diversity on a larger scale? Large databases of homologous sequences representing diverse species (aka DNA barcodes; as of today, BOLD has over 700,000 records representing over 64,000 species) and new mathematical approaches to calculating diversity from nucleotide sequences (eg Sirovich 2009 PLoS ONE; I am co-author) may help provide a biological macroscope (Ausubel PNAS 2009) for understanding the genetic structure of biodiversity, complementary to the historical view expressed in the Tree of Life.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “World species census updated”

  1. Study in Queensland Says:
    January 26th, 2010 at 3:01 pm

    I currently study in Queensland Australia and in one of my classes our teacher had us read the “Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World, 2nd edition” report. I found this to be very interesting and was shocked to read that 18,000 new species are being described each year and in 2007 75% of those were invertebrates. Our teacher took the class on a field trip and we got the chance to see some of these amazing species. The hole class was in shock that their were so many species that have not been identified or named yet.

Contact: mark.stoeckle@rockefeller.edu

About this site

This web site is an outgrowth of the Taxonomy, DNA, and Barcode of Life meeting held at Banbury Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, September 9-12, 2003. It is designed and managed by Mark Stoeckle, Perrin Meyer, and Jason Yung at the Program for the Human Environment (PHE) at The Rockefeller University.

About the Program for the Human Environment

The involvement of the Program for the Human Environment in DNA barcoding dates to Jesse Ausubel's attendance in February 2002 at a conference in Nova Scotia organized by the Canadian Center for Marine Biodiversity. At the conference, Paul Hebert presented for the first time his concept of large-scale DNA barcoding for species identification. Impressed by the potential for this technology to address difficult challenges in the Census of Marine Life, Jesse agreed with Paul on encouraging a conference to explore the contribution taxonomy and DNA could make to the Census as well as other large-scale terrestrial efforts. In his capacity as a Program Director of the Sloan Foundation, Jesse turned to the Banbury Conference Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, whose leader Jan Witkowski prepared a strong proposal to explore both the scientific reliability of barcoding and the processes that might bring it to broad application. Concurrently, PHE researcher Mark Stoeckle began to work with the Hebert lab on analytic studies of barcoding in birds. Our involvement in barcoding now takes 3 forms: assisting the organizational development of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life and the Barcode of Life Initiative; contributing to the scientific development of the field, especially by studies in birds, and contributing to public understanding of the science and technology of barcoding and its applications through improved visualization techniques and preparation of brochures and other broadly accessible means, including this website. While the Sloan Foundation continues to support CBOL through a grant to the Smithsonian Institution, it does not provide financial support for barcoding research itself or support to the PHE for its research in this field.