Collecting

[Jorge Soberon Mainero]

The problem of whether one should keep collecting or not may be so in the
United Kingdom, which is probably the best known country in the world.
However, in high beta-diversity countries the job is far from finished
and we simply do not have neither the hard facts nor enough expertise or
modelling capacity to predict fully what will be found in non collected
places. Of course any field biologists with enough expertise in a group is
capable of predicting a lot about species composition of non explored
sites. However, the world is full of surprises even to ornithologists,
mammalogists and butterfly persons, and clearly things are even worse for
botanists and invertebrate zoologists.

If we accept the figure of about 90% of species still to be discovered,
it is fairly clear that our task is how to educate the public (including,
big surprise, physicists and experimental biologists in control of $$$)
on the impossibility of finding out what is still out there without keep
doing our collecting.

Regards to all

Jorge Soberon