COVERLETTER SENT TO PARTICIPANTS WITH COPY OF NSF PROPOSAL
_________________________________________________________________
26 December 1992
Department of Biology
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pa. 19104
fax 215-898-8780
Dear Participant in the 16-18 April Workshop on an All-taxa Inventory:
Please forgive this generalized letter but it is my only chance of getting
this off to you before leaving for Costa Rica on 27 December.
Enclosed is a copy of the NSF workshop proposal that went into NSF on 14
December. Jim Edwards and Kris Krishtalka seemed to feel that it could be
externally reviewed in time for funding of the 16-18 April date (provided
that the reviewers don't kill it). Given the very high level of positive
reinforcement that I have received from Jim and Kris, I feel that NSF
would very much like to be the sponsor for this workshop. However, in the
worst possible case that NSF turns it down, I am committed to going into
some kind of crisis behavior to find the funding from some other source. I
really do not have the personal flexibility to postpone it, since I have
to be in Costa Rica by 24 April to begin teaching a course, and am then
locked into Costa Rica by a wide variety of commitments through the end of
August.
I am thinking in terms of all of you arriving the afternoon-evening of 15
April (Philadelphia airport for distant, 30th street train station for
those of you from the Washington, D.C. region, I assume). I am hoping
that all can stay through the evening of 18 April, to leave the morning of
the 19th. I am assuming that our travel agent here can do all the
reservations and send you your tickets, but I will get back to you later
in January on that.
Please feel very free to share this proposal with anyone, and solicit
commentary from anyone - be they users of the information and specimens to
be generated by an all-taxa inventory, and/or be they those who will
generate that information. I will be at the 11-15 January US-Smithsonian
international workshop on biodiversity inventories, distribute the
proposal widely, and discuss it with anyone who will listen.
Any comments from you or anyone else should be sent to my office in
Philadelphia (address above) if you think that they will get there before
15 January (before 11 January, if you want me to take them into
consideration in my discussions at the 11-15 January Smithsonian
workshop). After that date and through about 15 March, it is better to
send them to me in Costa Rica (I will spend about 15 March until the
workshop at my Philadelphia address). In Costa Rica, the reliable FAX is
at INBio (506-36-28-16) as well as is the reliable address (airmail to
D. H. Janzen, INBio, 3100 Santo Domingo de Heredia, Heredia, Costa Rica).
Do not try e-mail to me in Costa Rica. The bitnet net is in, and internet
is arriving, but that is still just to San Jose, INBio, and other central
things. Out where we live in northwestern Costa Rica (the Guanacaste
Conservation Area, GCA or ACG as it is called in Spanish) the telephone
line really only works from in to out, and out to in is left for the
locals who know and can monitor the secrets of time of day (radio phone),
whether there is a cloud over the solar panel, storm interference, etc.
Stuff sent by FAX to me to INBio is then forwarded by a local by FAX to me
in the GCA. It is generally of no use for you to try to call me there
(506-69-55-98) because a staff of 85 people use one phone line.
As for my office in Philadelphia, for the remainder of January, Alicia
Kikuchi will be working out of my office and attending to my mail and
voice-mail messages, but about the best she can do with your inquiries is
to forward them on to me in Costa Rica. Between the end of January and
about 15 March, a departmental secretary will do the same. I plan to
return to Philadelphia about 15 March, to work full-time on getting ready
for the workshop until it occurs.
I would like to dream that we can do lots of preliminary discussing and
thinking about the subject matter of the workshop before we get there.
This brief letter is an effort to begin in that direction, as will be my
responses to you all to what you write in. It would be very fine if we
could arrive at the workshop with many issues partly thought through, and
even some sort of fuzzy exoskeleton and internal skeleton in place, but
amply covered with meristem.
It would help me very much if each of you could jot down for me the major
taxa that you are willing to take responsibility for. I will put all that
together, and then figure out who to assign the tardigrades, peripatus,
sponges, and other orphans to. Please be generous with accepting
responsibility for groups. Many of you have cryptic taxonomic abilities
for which you are not known, but will do fine for the purposes of this
workshop.
I am too jet-lagged and exhausted to write an extensive commentary on the
workshop now, but I plan to do that during the first two weeks of January.
However, there are a few things that I should comment on, and would
welcome your comments on.
1. I was told by NSF to formalize the workshop proposal (you can all see
that I am not much of a bureaucrat, even when I try), so it does not say
the following explicitly, but what I tell people when introducing the
subject is "given that you had a serious large budget ($20 million-plus),
wanted to inventory all taxa, were restricted to a single large site (and
subsites within it), and had to do it in a relatively short time, what
would be your general plan of attack?"
I feel that a "large site" should be big enough that it contains strongly
differing habitats for the species with big and wide-ranging organisms
(higher plants, vertebrates, many insect orders) and is representative of
one or more ecosystems; if this is unimaginably large for some groups of
little things (microbes, for example), then some level of incompleteness
would be acceptable for them within this larger area. A large site would
then, I suspect for many parts of the world, then be 50,000 to 100,000 ha.
A relatively short time means, I suspect, something like five years. Less
than that, and I suspect that many species would get missed just because
during that time they were not common enough to be found. Also, less than
that would get mired down in all those things that cannot be done in just
a few years no matter how much money you throw at them. On the other
hand, if it gets to be much more than five years, then we are getting into
the realm of being so slow that however well the project goes, it will not
become a pilot project fast enough to be a major cause of similar efforts
cranking up in other places with enough time ahead of them to make a real
difference in the ongoing process of tropical biodiversity loss.
It would be ideal if we could quickly fix these major boundary conditions
relatively constant, and then concentrate on the questions of how does one
do this thing (and what will it cost).
I mention $20 million as a minimum figure for what I feel a serious
all-taxa inventory of a biodiverse major terrestrial ecosystem, would cost
- and to emphasize that such an inventory will cost real funding of a
level not normally envisioned by biodiversity workers (and therefore
clearly not something in competition with the woefully small contemporary
basic research budgets of NSF biodiversity programs, but rather, some
major source of new money).
2. While the focus of this workshop is meant to be general (e.g., not a
site-specific document as a product), there is nothing at all wrong with
having specific cases in mind as you think your way through this, and I
encourage you to do this. I feel that we certainly need to be thinking of
places that are large enough and diverse enough to contain hundreds of
thousands of species (and perhaps many more if the "wild" bacteria are as
speciose as they are now appearing to be).
Of course it is my intent to work with INBio in Costa Rica to do such an
all-taxa inventory of a major site, using the workshop document as a
guideline for a very site-specific and on-site workshop (late 1993?) of
those who would actually carry out the inventory, to generate an actual
proposal that NSF can insert into its overall budgetary process. I also
assume that at least several other specific sites will emerge, for
possible funding by NSF or other governments.
3. I can see that a major consideration will be, for each group of
organisms, "What are the tradeoffs in time and budget for the different
possible approaches to getting all of the species in the project area?"
4. While this is not the core topic of this particular workshop, it would
be very helpful for the workshop and the users of its output, if each of
you would think very broadly as to who are the users (private and
government, profit and non-profit) for the results of a complete inventory
of your particular taxa. I would like very much to hear these so as to
begin to draw up a composite statement on this topic.
5. I suggest that we not spend our time worrying about how to do an
all-taxa inventory in a place that lacks modern logistics (roads,
electricity, buildings, reliable water, national protective legislation,
national administrative infrastructure, easy access, etc.). In other
words, interior Zaire or much of the rainforest on the foothill slopes of
the eastern Andes are not yet ready for an all-taxa inventory. This means
that the general conclusions will not be applicable to large portions of
the tropics at the moment. On the other hand, those areas not ready today
will become ready some day, and the existence of an all-taxa inventory
protocol may well hasten that day.
Likewise, I am of the opinion that a large-scale all-taxa inventory should
not be invested in an area that does not contain some major pieces of
relatively undisturbed habitat/ecosystem. In other words, a central US
farming region might have many kinds of anthropogenic habitats and a huge
fraction of the species originally present, but to be worth the effort I
feel that it should have also a large patch of relatively intact
vegetation along with the anthropogenic habitats. The Pleistocene loss of
big mammals, and the recent losses of passenger pigeons, carnivores,
old-growth forest, megamarshes, etc. render all New World habitats
severely disturbed at one level, but it seems that we should do the best
we can to cover the range of successional possibilities still available.
I also do not think that an all-taxa inventory should be focused on a
habitat or ecosystem that is in the process of being destroyed; salvage
inventories are of course very functional, but that is not what I think we
should be focused on here (and they will have quite different goals and
methodologies, seems to me). Whatever the case, it seems to me that the
workshop might well consider a taxonomy of inventories, and make a first
stab at describing some of the conditions under which different species of
inventories might be most appropriate.
6. While we need very much to think about how to get the organisms
concerned, I feel that the workshop should also very much take into
consideration the processing of this material once it is off-site at
museums, universities, research centers, and on taxonomists' desks (who
are not necessarily those involved in capturing or collecting it).
7. A major item of discussion will be generated by the fact that there
will be major heterogeneity with respect to how soon a taxon will get to
the "we have all the species in hand, and we know where at least one
lives" stage. Once a taxon has gotten to that point, should
a) its inventory be declared "done" and the human and cash
resources moved to another more incompletely inventoried taxon, or
b) should the activity stay on a given taxon and continue into the
"post-inventory" stages of biodiversity management and study.
I generally opt for a) as an administrative designed to achieve
the goal of the project, but there are clearly cases where b) should also
be allowed to some degree.
8. I would like to touch on a delicate subject by expressing the opinion
that the goal of an all-taxa inventory is not to know how many species are
in the site (but rather to know what species are there and where they are,
and then begin doing things with them). Such a number should be an
easily-derivable byproduct, however, of an inventory. A very inflammatory
corollary is that the methodologies to be employed in the inventory are
not solely justifiable on the basis that they will allow the determination
of how many species occur in other areas (world networks, etc.), unless
those methodologies are either extremely cheap or automatically a
byproduct of other methodologies.
Let me be more specific. I have yet to see a case in tropical
conservation or other kind of biodiversity management where it mattered
whether a site had 200 or 300 species of butterflies. Which butterflies,
which habitats, population sizes, associated organisms, and a host of
non-biological considerations, are vastly more important in the
decision-making process of biodiversity management for and by all sorts of
users. Put another way, if there was a book that magically gave the exact
number of species of butterflies present in every single national park,
forest reserve and large block of wildland left in the tropics, but did
not tell you what butterflies they are, I think that it would get very
little use except to generate descriptive correlations of butterfly number
of species with this or that other habitat variable. These correlations
of course are of interest for certain kinds of basic studies (and abound
in the literature), but are they where one should allocate finite
resources among the multitude of other inventory activities that have both
basic and applied importance to a variety of users?
I suggest thinking through "your" group of organisms with the goal of
organizing an all-taxa inventory, and ask to what degree counting per se
of species is important, and to whom, at what budget allocation, as
compared with other budget allocations.
9. After reading through the NSF proposal, I would be most grateful if
you were to take the two lists of questions/topics and let your
imagination run rampant in adding to them, and send me such lists to
attempt to pool in the next month or so.
10. For those of you working with organisms that are so speciose and
hard to sample that you think that an all-taxa inventory is simply
impossible over a "large" area, would you give some extensive thought as
to what processes you would use to select the subsites within the entire
area? Diversity versus replication is going to be a killer on this one.
11. You can count on this poly-dialogue generating a request sometime
in the next couple of months that you think out what would be the first,
second, third, etc. steps for getting all the species in your taxa,
starting with day one.
12. Equally, could you give some thought to the question of at what
point in completeness you are willing to take the time and dollar budget
for your taxa and pass it over to the budget for other groups that are
slower to inventory, more speciose, etc.
13. Equally, could you think through the databasing and GIS efforts to
date for your taxa, focused on specimen-data bases rather than
species/habitat-data bases (but don't exclude the latter) with the idea of
identifying where are the specimen-specific pitfalls and taxa-specific
pitfalls. Example? Larval insects collected into a specimen-data base
have the nasty habit of generating parasitoids and hyperparasitoids days
to weeks later, each of which have their own data trails nested within the
primary (caterpillar) data trail. Imagine what happens when we collect
viruses, bacteria, fungal spores, ectoparasites, and parasitoids all from
the same individual caterpillar. Taxa-specific pitfalls? I assume that
some taxa are going to acquire quite incredible audit trails as they first
get names and then get synonymized as the specimens from the inventory
facilitate revisionary work. Vertebrates not a problem, but insects and
maybe polymorphic fungi a nightmare?
14. Finally, could you think strongly on the question of the best kinds
of temporary names/vouchers for your taxa until they have "real" formal
names?
15. As for the methodology of the workshop, what I hope we can all agree
on is not dividing into subgroups, but rather have all of us consider each
question and aspect. This means, for example, that a virus person would
be listening to a short discussion of various kinds of methodologies of
trapping insects into alcohol and other media, and hopefully asking
whether this renders the specimens absolutely useless from a virologist's
standpoint, and whether there might be some alternative methods that will
satisfy both the virologist and the entomologist. Same applies, for
example, to the various methods of preserving plant specimens - air-dried,
formalin, alcohol in plastic bags, forced hot air plant driers, etc. -
that may variably affect the possibilities of collecting fungi, mites and
microbes off of the leating references for the final document, and I am
sure that all of you have favorite inventory methods and philosophy
papers. Please, please, please collect the reference in its complete
form, as ready for appearance in Ecology, Evolution, etc. If at all
possible, please collect a xerox or reprint of the actual work. The very
finest papers will be ones with titles such as "The anatomy of a complete
inventory of the annelid worms of Nova Scotia" (fictitious). "What
happens when you fog a rainforest tree" papers are of course of use too,
as well as detailed technique papers about this or that trap or sampling
methodology. These reprints should make an invaluable file for the
workshop, and I suppose might even be usefully duplicated and bound as a
tool for complete inventory efforts as they begin to appear. Where an
entire book is involved, if you can get me the address where to order it,
before sending me the reference, that will help, since I will have to be
ordering it from Costa Rica most likely.
All for now. Please don't get mad or disgusted when I say naive or
off-base things. Just tell me what is wrong with them, and best of all,
give us multiple alternatives, or new ways of looking at the old problem.
Again, thank you all for the quite amazing enthusiasm for this thing that
you have all expressed over the phone and in letters.
Sincerely yours
Daniel H. Janzen
Professor of Biology
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