A year ago, 40 scientists and professionals from around the world met at the California Academy of Sciences to do something about this gap in our knowledge. They established the All Species Foundation, an organization based in San Francisco that is seeking to catalog every living species on Earth within one generation (25 years).

Brian Boom, who was vice president for botanical science at the New York Botanical Gardens for 10 years, is to be the organization's CEO. "I like big projects and big ideas," he said. "This is an incredibly exciting project that brings together my experience as a grassroots scientist and as an administrator."

Those qualifications will come in handy for a project that requires plenty of coordination and a thorough understanding of taxonomy, which is the classification of organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships.

The new foundation doesn't seek to reinvent the wheel; instead it aims to act as a catalyst by channeling funds to those already doing work at the grassroots level, creating partnerships and investing in new technologies such as DNA analysis.

"I see myself as the middle man, the broker that helps put it all together," said Boom. "We want to accelerate the process so that it can be completed in 25 years from now." The finite nature of the endeavor means that Boom will find himself out of a job in 25 years, but it also imparts a sense of urgency to his work. "Personally, I'm looking forward to the fact that I will see the completion of this project within my lifetime," he said. "More importantly, given the rate of species loss as a result of humanity's operating in ignorance of what's really out there, it is crucial that we do this as soon as possible."

The task at hand is monumental and fraught with challenges. Many museums and research centers around the world lack the proper infrastructure of the care and collection of specimens, many taxonomists lack knowledge of the latest research techniques or access to up-to-date technologies, and the taxonomic process of collection of specimens is sometimes less than efficient.

Another major challenge is lining up the necessary funds. The cost of identifying, cataloguing and publicizing each new species is expected to be between $300 and $500. The All Species Foundation currently has $1 million in assets and has plans to raise $100 million in the near future. That might seem extremely ambitious given the current economic slump, but Boom said he hopes that the urgency and universal appeal of the project will persuade donors to contribute.

"This is a wholesome cause. It will benefit everybody and it is completely apolitical," he said. " It is a project that can have as much appeal to the people of Greenpeace as to the people of Monsanto because it is not about conservation, only about getting the information and making it available to all."

The All Species Foundation is not the first to take a stab at the monumental project of mapping life in the planet. Carl Linnaeus, an18th century Swedish scientist who is called the Father of Taxonomy, devoted his life to the creation of the modern system for naming, ranking and classifying organisms.

In his publications, Linnaeus provided a concise, usable survey of all the world's plants and animals as then known, about 7,700 species of plants and 4,400 species of animals. These works helped to establish and standardize the consistent binomial nomenclature for species that he introduced on a world scale for plants in 1753 and for animals in 1758, which is still used today.

The next steps for the All Species Foundation include several rounds of consultations with potential partners from around the world, at meetings scheduled to take place in Mexico, Australia and at Harvard University. The objective of these meetings, Boom said, is to define the full scope of the project and to bring proctocolitis into clearer focus. While the details of the venture are still a work in progress, what is certain is that it will offer taxonomists an increased sense of worth.

"Taxonomists have traditionally felt like second-class citizens in the scientific arena because they were not as cutting-edge as their counterparts in molecular biology," said Boom "So one of the objectives of this new foundation is to celebrate the heroism and discovery role of taxonomists, which will ultimately make this project happen."