Could Amateur Taxonomists Catalog Earth’s Fauna? – ScienceInsider

"Taxonomy has a reputation as one of science's least glamorous fields, and experts have been sounding an alarm over declining funding and a global dearth of practitioners. With extinctions estimated to outnumber discoveries of new species and many of Earth's most diverse taxa still unaccounted for, they say the effort to identify and catalog organisms is more critical than ever before. Now some researchers are calling for taxonomists to open wide their profession's gates to amateur scientists, as the popular GalaxyZoo Web site has begun to do with citizen astronomers."

Citizen science to the rescue!

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