Funding, training, permits—the three big challenges of taxonomy

Taxonomy is “the scientific discipline that explores, discovers, interprets, represents, names, and organizes organic beings” (Ebach et al. 2011: 550). It is one of the oldest biological disciplines. A decrease in the number of taxonomists, and the lack of sufficient funding for taxonomy, caused by the lack of appreciation for this area of research, have been mentioned as some of the major factors impacting taxonomic research and impeding its progress (e.g. Dubois 2003; Carvalho et al. 2007; Ebach et al. 2011, but see Tancoigne & Dubois 2013 for an alternative view). Currently ca. 1.6 million species are known scientifically, but estimates about the true diversity of life on our planet range from several million (Costello et al. 2012) to 2 billion species once bacteria are included (Larsen et al. 2017). With habitat loss at an unprecedented scale and speed, and other anthropogenic negative influences, the discovery and scientific documentation of biodiversity, in the form of species descriptions, is felt by many taxonomists as a race against time. Only species bearing a scientific name are entities recognized by society and politics for conservation, often with a strong bias towards the larger and charismatic species. Various attempts to stem the tide of losing species before they are even discovered by the dwindling number of taxonomists globally have included various initiatives, of which the most prominent were the NSF-funded Planetary Biodiversity Inventories (PBI) and Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET), the first directed at monographically covering an entire taxonomic group globally and the second at training the next generation of taxonomists. An international, cross-institutional spotfocus on biodiverse areas, or the fast publication of large numbers of species by standardized workflows have also been identified as ways to tackle the taxonomy crisis. DNA taxonomy and DNA barcoding have been hailed more than 15 years ago as the new approaches that would overcome the taxonomic impediment (Godfray 2002; Hebert et al. 2003, 2004; Tautz et al. 2003), but studies like that of Bebber et al. (2013) seem to indicate that this has not happened. While DNA taxonomy was intentioned by its protagonists to replace traditional taxonomy, many taxonomic papers rather now include DNA barcodes and other DNA information alongside morphological characters—without DNA taxonomy having replaced traditional taxonomy. We predict that in the genomic era additional genetic marker systems will enter taxonomic descriptions, without changing the forever integrative character of this discipline. This can be taken as evidence for the continued primacy of a morphological and an organismic view in taxonomy over the reductionist DNA-only approach. Genetic approaches have certainly helped highlight taxa with underappreciated species level diversity, and have speeded up the step of species discovery, particularly in morphologically challenging and hyperdiverse groups. Yet, they have not helped to speed up species descriptions—it can even be argued they have sometimes slowed down the process, but without doubt have increased its scientific thoroughness (when welldone; see for a recent example Srivathsan et al. 2019). Species descriptions still rely on the expertise of a practicing taxonomist to provide the important step of scientifically defining, and diagnosing, a new species including the nomenclatural act that makes a name available under the Code of Zoological Nomenclature or the Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants. Even the recently propagated approach of ‘turbo-taxonomy’, which has been highly successful to tackle hyperdiverse taxa (e.g. Butcher et al. 2012; Riedel et al. 2013; Riedel & Narakusumo 2019), still must employ the expertise of a trained taxonomist to reach its goal, bringing us back to one of the continuing challenges, the decreasing number of practicing taxonomists in general. A recent example for this bottleneck is the study by Srivathsan et al. (2019) that identified more than 650 phorid fly species. Yet, only a single species was described as new to science. The training and recruitment of the next-generation taxonomists gets increasingly difficult with university Funding, training, permits—the three big challenges of taxonomy