Species explorers ask: What's on Your planet?

TEMPE, Ariz. – Taxonomy, the science responsible for species exploration and classification, has been largely ignored in recent decades – a disregard that a new International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University is out to change.

“Our vision is to spark a renaissance in taxonomy through a transdisciplinary fusion of ideas and technologies,” says founding director Quentin Wheeler, an entomologist and ASU vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

“In particular, we are in concert with partner museums and botanical gardens around the world, committed to transforming taxonomy into what will effectively prove a new field: cybertaxonomy,” he says.

To bring attention to cybertaxonomy and to celebrate the founding of the institute, a symposium and inaugural Linnaean Legacy Lecture is set for March 3 on ASU’s Tempe campus.

The symposium – “What’s on Your Planet? Species Exploration and Charting Biodiversity” – will be held from 1 to 4:30 p.m. in the Fulton Center, Sixth Floor Boardroom. Speakers include: David Williams, senior researcher and head of Global Biodiversity in the Botany Department of the Natural History Museum, London; Olivier Rieppel, the MacArthur Curator of Fossil Reptiles and chair of the Department of Geology at the Field Museum in Chicago; Robert E. Kohler, emeritus professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania; Michael Schmitt, editor-in-chief of Bonner zooogische Beiträge and with the Zoological Research Museum in Bonn, Germany; and Diana Lipscomb, professor of biological sciences, George Washington University.

The inaugural Linnaean Legacy Lecture, co-sponsored by the institute and the Linnean Society of London, will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Life Sciences Building, A-Wing, Room 191. The guest lecturer is Norman I. Platnick, the Peter J. Solomon Family Curator of Spiders at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. His topic is “Coming of Age (at 250!): The Past, Present and Future of the Systematics Workforce.”