Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Switzerland all score highest on the press freedom records, as listed here. The US comes in a rather dismal 22nd place.
In a 2001(?) issue of National Geographic there was a fantastic article on moths photographed with a hacked dia scanner. If I recall correctly it mentioned a resolution of up to a million dpi. Pictures of up to 1 meter in length were put on a wall and made into an exposition. Great stuff.
The cataloging bit is not so much the goal here. Nor is completeness. As you can read in the article, the people who are currently trying to preserve parts of nature can't make proper decisions on which bits to preserve and which to neglect because of their lower conservational value.
Most conservation efforts start with identifying what's actually present inside an area. For a few groups such as birds, mammals, and butterflies, we have a pretty good knowledge of who's present, despite the occasional deer being discovered in Vietnam or the ten or so new bird species Peru has reveiled over the last few years. But in most groups, which actually account for 99% of biodiversity were are at a complete loss. So much for making sound judgements on where to make the next National Parks.
In order to know how much biodiversity actually needs to be preserved to for instance keep speciation going, or to keep extinction at a minimum, we have to get some basic insight into current state of affairs. Again, just knowing what species you're dealing with is a prerequisite if you want to obtain a global picture.
So from a practical point of view, completeness of the database is not essential. Getting our working knowledge of species from 1% to 50% would be a great step forward, and would probably be enough to obtain much better estimates of extinction rates.
As to how to even get DNA from all those millions of species, most of which have such small ranges and thrive in low numbers in inhospitable places, I can't say I have much of a clue either.
Slashdot Mirror
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Switzerland all score highest on the press freedom records, as listed here. The US comes in a rather dismal 22nd place.
In a 2001(?) issue of National Geographic there was a fantastic article on moths photographed with a hacked dia scanner. If I recall correctly it mentioned a resolution of up to a million dpi. Pictures of up to 1 meter in length were put on a wall and made into an exposition. Great stuff.
Has someone else noted the slight difference in numbers of hits? 542 on MSN vs some 59,300,000 on Google?
Does anyone know why?
I would like to ask you that very same question.
The cataloging bit is not so much the goal here. Nor is completeness. As you can read in the article, the people who are currently trying to preserve parts of nature can't make proper decisions on which bits to preserve and which to neglect because of their lower conservational value.
Most conservation efforts start with identifying what's actually present inside an area. For a few groups such as birds, mammals, and butterflies, we have a pretty good knowledge of who's present, despite the occasional deer being discovered in Vietnam or the ten or so new bird species Peru has reveiled over the last few years. But in most groups, which actually account for 99% of biodiversity were are at a complete loss. So much for making sound judgements on where to make the next National Parks.
In order to know how much biodiversity actually needs to be preserved to for instance keep speciation going, or to keep extinction at a minimum, we have to get some basic insight into current state of affairs. Again, just knowing what species you're dealing with is a prerequisite if you want to obtain a global picture.
So from a practical point of view, completeness of the database is not essential. Getting our working knowledge of species from 1% to 50% would be a great step forward, and would probably be enough to obtain much better estimates of extinction rates.
As to how to even get DNA from all those millions of species, most of which have such small ranges and thrive in low numbers in inhospitable places, I can't say I have much of a clue either.