Triage for the biosphere : The need and rationale for taxonomic inventories and phylogenetic studies of parasites

Abstract

A parasitological perspective in biodiversity survey and inventory provides powerful insights into the history, structure, and maintenance of the biosphere. Parasitology contributes a powerful conceptual paradigm or landscape that links ecology, systematics, evolution, biogeography, behavior, and an array of biological phenomena from the molecular to the organismal level across the continuum of microparasites to macroparasites and their vertebrate and invertebrate hosts. Effective survey and inventory can be strategically focused or can take a synoptic approach, such as that represented by the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory. We argue that parasitology should be an integral component of any programs for biodiversity assessment on local, regional, or global scales. Taxonomists, who constitute the global taxasphere, hold the key to the development of effective surveys and inventories and eventual linkage to significant environmental and socioeconomic issues. The taxasphere is like a triage team. The battlefield is the biosphere, and the war is human activities that degrade the biosphere. Sadly, at the point in time that we realize we have documented only a tiny portion of the world's diversity, and want to document more, we find that one of the most rare and declining groups of biologists is the taxasphere. This taxonomic impediment, or critical lack of global taxonomic expertise recognized by Systematics Agenda 2000 and DIVERSITAS, prevents initiation and completion of biodiversity research programs at a critical juncture, where substantial components of global diversity are threatened. The Convention for Biological Diversity mandates that we document the biosphere more fully, and as a consequence, it is necessary to revitalize the taxasphere. One foundation for development of taxonomic expertise and knowledge is the Global Taxonomy Initiative and its 3 structural components: (1) systematic inventory, (2) predictive classifications, and (3) systematic knowledge bases. We argue that inclusion of parasites is critical to the success of the Global Taxonomy Initiative. Predictive databases that integrate ecological and phylogenetic knowledge from the study of parasites are synergistic, adding substantially greater ecological, historical, and biogeographic context for the study of the biosphere than that derived from data on free-living organisms alone.