The All Species Foundation aimed to catalog all species on Earth by 2025. It began in 2001 as a spinoff of the Long Now Foundation.
The Foundation started with a large grant from the Schlinger Foundation but because of the stock market crash of 2000, at least in part, it was unable to attract appreciable additional funding.
The All Species Foundation received some criticism over the goal of identifying literally all species on earth. The criticism was that in reality species often have indistinct boundaries so that it is often not possible to objectively decide when there is a single species or multiple species.
Famous quotes containing the words species and/or foundation:
“The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“If all political power be derived only from Adam, and be to descend only to his successive heirs, by the ordinance of God and divine institution, this is a right antecedent and paramount to all government; and therefore the positive laws of men cannot determine that, which is itself the foundation of all law and government, and is to receive its rule only from the law of God and nature.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)