Challenges and Opportunities of Integrative Taxonomy for Research and Society (2014)

Taxonomy, the science of identifying, describing and classifying living organisms, is currently experiencing a technological revolution. The rapid development of molecular biological high-throughput methods, so-called OMICS methods, for sequencing and analysing genetic information, proteins and metabolic products, opens completely new dimensions for the biosciences. The rapid pace at which these data as well as phenotypic traits of the species can be automatically generated enables taxonomists to come tantalisingly close to their major goal – cataloguing our planet’s entire range of biological diversity.