The Mission to discover Australia’s remaining species is a critical national scientific undertaking if we are to tackle Australia’s extinction crisis.

In 200 years since the European invasion of Australia, we have officially acknowledged the extinction of 105 species, resulting mainly from land clearing for agriculture and invasive species. But the true number of extinctions over that period is likely to be much greater because many species are likely to have gone extinct before they were known to western science.

While the true number of Australian animals, plants and fungi species is unknown, it is estimated that western science has described just 30 per cent. So basic maths will tell you that we could well have lost at least 200 undescribed species since Europeans arrived in Australia.

Even in the last bushfires, it’s quite likely we lost some plant, insect or fungi species that were not yet known to western science.

Funding species discovery is a basic first step toward addressing Australia’s extinction crisis. If you don’t know what you’ve got, you cant protect it.

Unfortunately, funding for threatened species conservation in Australia is woeful, despite us having the highest rate of biodiversity loss in the developed world, and the second highest rate on the planet.

We need Commonwealth and State Governments to step up and properly fund discovery, protection and recovery our unique and precious Australian threatened species.

From an entomological point of view, discovering and describing new insect species is of paramount importance not only for a better understanding of Australian biodiversity but also to protect its agriculture and biosecurity.

Indeed, undescribed species may risk triggering expensive biosecurity responses if mistakenly identified as similar-looking pests. On the other hand, insect pest species may hide in plain sight, because too similar to harmless endemic groups and therefore hard to be targeted by pest management operations. This is due to the fact that describing and naming a species is the first step to further study its biology, in fact we often lack ecological and behavioural information on a species that has not been described.

Discovering a new species can provide the tools for its identification and enable to understand how to protect it, if a threatened endemic species, or how to fight it, if a newly emerged pest. Ultimately, described species bear a name that can be used by policymakers to determine the real biosecurity risk associated with a species, distinguishing it from closely related, harmless, native groups that need our protection.

Many thousands of Australian species are estimated to have gone extinct in the last few hundred years, without ever being formally recorded. Recent history has seen an increasing dependence on metrics such as GDP and population growth as measures of success in a global context, often with reckless abandonment for natural environments and species.

The economic benefit of natural environments and species is very difficult to measure because monetary value cannot be directly given and thus undervalued. Instead, value is measured ethically, morally or intrinsically such as with known benefits to disease control, mental health, climate and ecosystem stability. However, these indirect benefits are undervalued when the feasibility of economically driven projects are deliberated. Indeed, permanent costs to our natural environment and native species through land clearance are perceived as unfortunate, but necessary losses for economic productivity.

Ideally, providing a detailed account of how the discovery of new species may provide economic benefit may slow and eventually stop unsustainable developments that lead to species extinctions. However, it may be some time before traditional metrics of societal success become replaced with those that align with sustainable and equitable development. Until then, providing a tangible estimate to our economy will reflect at least a small proportion of the immense intrinsic worth of species discovery.

The AAS report provides a comprehensive and conservative estimate of the economic benefit of investing in cataloguing Australia’s incredibly diverse species. Australia’s biodiversity is like our life-support system and we rely on it for our survival despite not knowing fully how it works. 
 
Our knowledge gaps are largest with respect to invertebrates, fungi and microorganisms such as algae, bacteria and viruses. While our most charismatic and iconic Australian species are relatively well-characterised, their survival depends on many (yet-unknown) interactions with undescribed species. 
 
The AAS report captures the necessary multi-disciplinary workforce that will be required to achieve the ambitious task of discovering all Australian species. As a geneticist, I am particularly pleased to see a focus on supporting stream-lining of the generation of genetic data. Currently it can take a research team several years to conduct a fairly simple genetic study. That time-line will be dramatically reduced if the process were supported by coordinated genomics infrastructure. 
 
As a researcher working in the Australian National Wildlife Collection, I am pleased to see the focus on training a new generation of taxonomists. We are in a race against the clock of extinction and we need to deploy a network of highly-trained specialists to systematically discover what species we have before they are lost. Melville et al provides a framework for determining how to prioritise spending and effort in achieving this goal. Their framework relies on specialist taxonomy knowledge; therefore, we need to be promoting taxonomy as a viable career option to university students who will someday be leading conservation efforts. Geneticists such as myself cannot do the work of cataloguing species alone. We need the species-specific knowledge that only a taxonomist can provide to put our genetic data into context.

The results of the PLOS One study are remarkable. Lizards and snakes are so familiar, present in every Australian backyard, it is hard to believe the taxonomy was so poorly understood. An increase in species richness of 25 per cent in the group is amazing. The results are similar to what we are finding on the Great Barrier Reef where we think there are up to three times more coral species than previous estimates.

The goal to name and find all Australian species in a decade is ambitious, but as the Deloitte Access Economics report suggests, the economic benefits will be huge. These are exciting times for Australian taxonomy.

Discovering and naming all of Australia’s species of animals, plants, fungi and other organisms is important for Australia’s prosperity and future wellbeing. Few people realise that only around a third of Australia’s species have been discovered so far, and that at current rate it will take more than four hundred years to discover and name the rest.

This means that many will go extinct before we know what they are, what they look like, what role they play in Australia’s environment, what opportunities they may offer and what threats they may face.

Species can only be conserved, managed and utilised if we know something about them. For the first time in history we have the technologies needed to discover and name all Australian species in a generation. All we need now is support and investment. We now know that naming and documenting all our species will bring direct economic benefits to Australia as well as ensuring that our species are protected for future generations. A mission to discover and document all our species will be a challenge on the same scale, and with similar costs and benefits, as other big science missions such as in space science and astronomy.

As an early career researcher in the field of taxonomy, it’s excellent to see the Deloitte Access Economics report state that the Taxonomy Australia mission to document all of the remaining species in Australia will bring significant economical benefits. Documenting the species that are in our environment gives us the knowledge to better manage our native and agricultural ecosystems, which is critical for the continued growth and health of society. It’s an exciting time to be part of this mission of scientific discovery, which with the right support and investment will be able to achieve its goals and bring benefits to all Australians.

Undertaking economic analysis to place a value on an activity is a common practice used to better prioritise investments and government support for initiatives. Prior to building a new port, stadium or museum, delivering improved health or education facilities or changing a government policy or regulation, economic analysis will often be undertaken to assess the number of jobs each activity will create and the economic uplift delivered to society.

Discovering and naming all of Australia’s species of animals, plants, fungi and other organisms is no different. It has the potential to deliver a significant economic dividend to Australia’s future prosperity. Deloitte Access Economics estimates for every dollar spent to undertake Taxonomy Australia’s mission over the next 25 years, the benefit will conservatively equate to between $4 and $35 to Australia. This is a significant dividend and reflects the value held within Australia’s unique biodiversity.

Australia is one of Earth’s megadiverse countries – a group of 17 nations that are home to the majority of global species – but we really have only scratched the surface in discovering and naming all our species. The vast majority of species remain unknown. Naming and documenting all Australia’s species would have huge benefits across the board – for conservation of biodiversity, biosecurity, health, agriculture and more.

We now have a clearly defined path to achieving this goal and the benefits to us all have been definitively outlined in the Deloitte Access Economics report. The profound importance of this foundational information cannot be underestimated and with support and investment the mission to document and name all Australia’s species is now possible.

For too long conservation and biodiversity scientists have shunned the tools of economists - these papers show the benefits of using economic approaches to science and conservation.

These two publications show how return on investment and cost-benefit analysis thinking can help us make better decisions for prioritising actions and scientific research - bravo.

The economic thinking in these papers helps us to understand biodiversity and manage Australia’s rich natural heritage far more efficiently; plus, it shows the enormous benefits to Australia of increased investment in science and science-informed actions.

Despite being a developed country, Australia lags behind many other places in the world regarding the discovery and description of our biodiversity. Australia, being isolated biogeographically for hundreds of thousands of years, has biota that have evolved in isolation, meaning we have very distinctive, unique species, most of which are found nowhere else in the world.

We already know we lead the world in the unglamorous position of suffering the greatest number of mammal extinctions in the last two centuries. We don't even know how many species we might stand to lose for most taxonomic groups - without knowing they exist, we can't effectively conserve them. Investing in biodiversity discovery and description is worthy, not just economically, but for Australia as a country in protecting our natural, irreplaceable, capital.

What is exciting here is the mission by Taxonomy Australia will importantly address some of the biggest taxonomic gaps - invertebrates. The estimates in the Melville et al. paper with snakes and lizards are just the tip of the iceberg!

Australia is facing unprecedented changes to the marine environment, yet we know little of the dominant animals, the segmented worms which live in the sediment. These animals play a critical role in the food chain being eaten by many other animals including commercially important species. They break down organic matter and aerate the sediments. Yet so much of this fauna is still undescribed, so how can we monitor these important communities for impacts of climate change if we do not know what species are present. How do we detect invasive species? Are they really invasive or just undescribed native species?  

How can we rectify this situation, we need to train the next generation of taxonomists and ensure that jobs are available, otherwise difficult to attract students. We also need to ensure that oceanographic cruises to explore Australian biodiversity off our coasts, includes funds to sort and identify this material when it comes back into Australian museums where most taxonomists reside. It is critical this is done asap as many of our marine invertebrate taxonomists are retired or close to retirement and critical that we mentor the next generation of taxonomist. Taxonomy is the basic building block of all biological science.

The work serves to illustrate what a remarkable continent Australia really is – the nation’s extraordinary levels of biodiversity – much of it remaining undiscovered. It shows what an exciting place it is to be a scientist, but also the critical custodial role that Australians have in protecting and conserving entire species that are found nowhere else.

In essence, what the Deloitte Access Economics report and Melville and colleagues’ study demonstrate, is that describing and cataloguing Australia’s extraordinary and largely globally unique biodiversity does not constitute an economic cost, but rather a very savvy investment that delivers substantial financial and other benefits.

The same is true for environmental protection and restoration. By understanding how many species we have, where they live, and what’s needed for their survival, we would be in a much better position to protect Australia’s remarkable plants, animals, fungi, other species and ecosystems.

Investing in the protection, care and recovery of species and ecosystems presents a massive opportunity for governments, businesses and industries, to create jobs (e.g. pest animal control, wildlife and environmental monitoring, revegetation, Indigenous ranger programs, tourism) and help recover bushfire- and COVID19-ravaged businesses and communities. In doing so we could reap huge cultural, social, economic and environmental benefits. Let’s get to work!

Twenty-five years ago, the first independent national report on the state of the environment estimated that Australia is home to about one million species, of which only 15 per cent had been described. It noted that we were losing our biodiversity 'at an alarming rate'. Our biodiversity is central to our cultural identity and critical for the integrity of natural systems on which we depend. This new report documents the economic importance of understanding our biodiversity. At the moment, we simply do not know the significance of what we are losing, so identifying and describing the species that we share this continent with is not just a scientific exercise. It is a critically important investment in our future.

I’m not at all surprised there is a huge economic benefit to discovering what lives in Australia. 

As a plant scientist and head of a botanic garden, I’m very aware that being able to identify and name a plant unlocks a vast array of benefits to that plant and to us. 

We need to discover and classify life on Earth so that species can survive in a changing world, so that we can control weeds and diseases, and so that we can develop new pharmaceuticals and agricultural crops. 

I love the ambition of documenting all Australian species within a generation. 

It’s time we took this Cinderella of sciences (taxonomy) seriously.