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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS r? JOURNAL'S r DIGITAL PUBLISHING ^American Institute ^/Biological Science Recovery Plan for the Endangered Taxonomy Profession Author(s): David L. Pearson, Andrew L. Hamilton, Terry L. Erwin Source: BioScience, Vol. 61, No. 1 (January 2011), pp. 58-63 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable7T0T525/bio.2011.61.1.11 Accessed: 14/01/2011 11:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www .jstor.org/action/showPublisher ?publisherCode=ucal. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press and American Institute of Biological Sciences are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to BioScience. STOR i® http: //www .j stor.org Professional Biologist Recovery Plan for the Endangered Taxonomy Profession DAVID L. PEARSON, ANDREW L. HAMILTON, AND TERRY L. ERWIN The worldwide decline in taxonomists has a broad impact on biology and society. Learning from general historical patterns of science and under- standing social changes caused by growing economies, we propose changes in priorities for training taxonomists to reverse these losses. Academically trained professionals, parataxonomists (local assistants trained by professional biologists), youths educated with an emphasis on natural history, and self-supported expert amateurs are the major sources of taxonomists. Recruiting effort from each category is best determined by public attitudes toward education, as well as the availability of discretionary funds and leisure time. Instead of concentrating on descriptions of species and narrow studies of morphology and DNA, the duties of the few professional taxonomists of the future also will be to use cyberspace and a wide range of skills to recruit, train, and provide direction for expert amateurs, young students, parataxonomists, the general public, and governments. Keywords: amateur, parataxonomist, per capita gross domestic product, pro-am, professional taxonomist The boundaries of the discipline of taxonomy are often efforts. As taxonomy transitions from a museum-based vague. They can include studies of anatomical structures, science to an information-based science, access to literature molecules, geographical distributions, behavior, natural his- and specimens will increase dramatically. New technology tory, and higher evolutionary relationships, with goals that presents an opportunity for taxonomy to expand its bound- some think are better treated as separate fields of study, such aries by providing a digital infrastructure to a range of as systematics and phylogenetics. To avoid many of these participants far beyond the classical model centered on misunderstandings and controversies, we define taxonomy professional taxonomists. as a field of biology that identifies, describes, classifies, and names living and extinct species and other taxa. A historical overview of taxonomy Geologists, medical researchers, behaviorists, natural One of the most reliable techniques for answering histori- resource managers, conservation biologists, policymakers, cal questions and testing for patterns is using insights from and the judiciary represent some of the vast array of disci- one field to tell us something about another—a philosophi- plines that rely heavily on an accurate documentation of taxa cal technique called consilience by some historians (Gad- and species (Cracraft 2002). Only 2 million of the estimated dis 2002). In so doing, we can make sense of the past and 7 million to 15 million species on Earth have been described. perhaps anticipate the future (Erwin 1985). The historical Despite this obvious taxonomic impediment, we have seen development of such varied fields as military science, astron- a significant waning of support for taxonomic research over omy, archaeology, geology, physics, computer science, horti- the last decades (Wheeler et al. 2004, Cotterill and Foissner culture, ichthyology, malacology, ornithology, mammalogy, 2010). Taxonomists are an endangered group. As a result, not entomology, and herpetology shares a common pattern with only are research efforts in many parts of the world at risk respect to the relationship between experts and amateurs but so too is the availability of information on which we rely (Leadbeater and Miller 2004). The earliest stages of these for medicine, ecosystem and wildlife management planning, fields were dominated by amateurs—there were often no and public policy. We propose a recovery plan that combines established experts at the time—who described and named established patterns from the history of science with present component parts such as species, rocks, stars, or bytes of and predicted future economic indicators to help broaden information. As these fields of study solidified, power was the pool of those who can contribute to taxonomy and transferred from expert amateurs to trained professional resolve the problem of the endangered taxonomist. This plan scientists, and graduate training for employment in the field draws on literature from economics and from recent work became available. In these cases, the maturation of fields led on the rise of professional amateur taxonomists to argue for to research that was increasingly conceptual and theoretical, specific changes in the way contributors to the taxonomic including systems analysis and the use of formal models. enterprise are recruited, trained, and supported in their As a result, technical terminology and methodology in these BioScience 61: 58-63. ISSN 0006-3568, electronic ISSN 1525-3244. © 2011 by American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. Request permis- sion to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions Web site at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprint- info.asp. doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.1.11 58 BioScience • January 2011 I Vol. 61 No. 1 www. biosciencemag. org Professional Biologist fields have become so refined that most of what is known Sources of taxonomists about these topics is now accessible to only a narrow audi- On the basis of a literature review and from discussions with ence of trained professionals (Pearson and Cassola 2007). other taxonomists, we conclude that there are four major This trend suggests that theoretical and institutional sources of taxonomists, and that these sources are often development in the biological sciences will lead reliably or interdependent. even inevitably to the exclusion of expert amateurs. Indeed, the 20th century saw a great deal of this, first with the rise Professionals. Taxonomists with university degrees, trained of population genetics in the early decades of the century in a setting that includes classical taxonomy, molecular tax- and then with the advent of molecular biology in the 1950s, onomy, and cybertaxonomy (standardized electronic tools followed by the push toward mathematical approaches to to share and access information), are the dominant source ecology in the 1970s. This result would be unfortunate in in academia (Wheeler 2008). More and more, taxonomy is taxonomy, where professional experts are becoming rare and conducted by professionals in allied scientific fields such as expert amateurs have long made important contributions, ecology, genetics, animal behavior, and conservation biology and may, with appropriate support from the professional who become part-time taxonomists by necessity (Godfray taxonomy community, continue to do so. and Knapp 2004). However, because taxonomy is mistakenly Taxonomy has become quite technical and specialized perceived as a weak, descriptive science with no experimenta- over the nearly 300 years that it has been practiced in tion (Felsenstein 2004), and because comparative morphol- its modern form. It requires access to specimens, librar- ogy, the heart of academic taxonomy, has long been out of ies of historical literature, multiple technical vocabularies, favor (Allen 1978), professional taxonomy positions and colleagues' expertise, computers for analyzing data, and wet funding for taxonomic research have waned dramatically labs for acquiring genetic information. The trend is toward since the mid-20th century (Mayr 1942). Hope for a sig- continued professionalization and the exclusion of amateurs. nificant resurgence in financial support for professional tax- There is little doubt that expert amateurs play a smaller role onomy is probably unrealistic (Agnarsson and Kuntner 2007, in taxonomy than they once did. In Europe and