Arthropod diversity and the future of all‐taxa inventories

Success or failure in the global challenge of cataloguing all life on Earth will depend to a large extent on our ability to survey and identify the countless millions of arthropod species that remain undescribed. key rate-limiting step in cataloguing biodiversity will ultimately be the craft of specimens in the field. The volume of arthropod specimens that can be obtained with modern sampling techniques vastly outstrips any capacity to identify this material screening large numbers of common species to find the long tail of rare species can be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. alternative approach initiated 10 years ago in Panama has recently ‘come of age’ in the first comprehensive analysis of the spatial distribution of arthropod biodiversity a lowland tropical forest (Basset et al., 2012). Project IBISCA-Panama (Investigating the BIodiversity of Soil and Canopy Arthropods, Panama module) represents a large-scale research initiative conducted explicitly as a‘joint venture’ between taxonomists and ecologists.