Our understanding of biodiversity and its evolutionary and ecological organization is being hampered by our highly incomplete taxonomic knowledge for most groups of organisms.
Taxonomy and the development of natural history collections have been the foundation for studying species diversity on Earth.
Advances in information technology and DNA-based approaches can improve the rate of species description and identification.
However, the scale of the task prevents the generation of complete inventories except for a few select groups.
For most of biodiversity, future approaches therefore will have to rely on extrapolations and statistical models that establish the magnitude and distribution of species richness and make inferences about the causes of diversity.
The need for higher quality information on biodiversity patterns and change requires an approach that: