Get Involved
- Visit a natural history museum or botanical garden. Your local museum and garden are wonderful places of discovery where researchers are studying species and where public exhibits allow you to enjoy biological diversity. Urge these institutions to develop more displays focused on species exploration and particularly showing new species named by their staff.
- Support the International Institute for Species Exploration. Arizona State University’s new Institute is partnering with international museums and botanical gardens to mount expeditions, describe species, build collections, and engineer new tools for species explorers of the 21st century.
- Get involved. Exploring species yourself is an incredibly exciting pastime. Beginning with a group of plants or animals for which good field guides exist is immediately rewarding and deepens the experience of being in Nature. With a little work learning appropriate terminology, many other groups of organisms become accessible. There are so many species and so few experts that important scientific discoveries are routinely made by amateur naturalists. Make a plant or insect collection. Keep and enjoy a diversity of tropical fish. Get a pair of binoculars and bird watch. The possibilities are endless.
- Celebrate Linnaeus. The great Swedish naturalist, Carl von Linne (also known as Carolus Linnaeus) initiated our modern system of plant and animal names and classifications. 2007 is his 300th birthday and 2008 is the 250th anniversary of the beginning of animal naming. There are many museum exhibits, lectures, and other celebrations of Linnaeus around the world. Wilfrid Blunt’s Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist is an excellent biography.