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 further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does fame become, especially of the literary sort. This species of fame a waggish acquaintance says can be manufactured to order, and sometimes is so manufactured.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.... God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.”
—Pierre Charron (15411603)