The term was coined in 1993, in connection with an effort initiated by ecologist Daniel Janzen to document the diversity of the Guanacaste National Park in Costa Rica.
Since these less popular organisms — invertebrates, fungi, algae, microbes — can play significant roles in ecosystem function, a full accounting of all taxa in a given location can improve conservation and management of biodiversity.
[8] Daniel Janzen, an ecologist who helped initiate the first ATBIs, has characterized the approach as “a direct response to, and a test of the ideas in” the Global Biodiversity Assessment.
The convention's Global Taxonomy Initiative included “efforts to carry out All-Taxon Biodiversity Inventories (ATBIs)” in its planned activities for protected areas at the COP8 meeting in 2006.
These efforts can involve dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people and take place over months, years or decades depending on the size and diversity of the area studied.
And to reach this goal with a team of national human resources working in collaboration with the international community of scientists and other users.”[9] Other benefits of this method as described by Janzen include “generating an enormous tool box, library and living museum for those searching for a particular bit of information, searching for a solution to a wildland biodiversity problem, or having to manage and develop a complex conserved wildland.”[9] A National Park Service overview of all-taxa inventory techniques distinguished ATBIs from similar approaches because of their focus on a single geographic site selected for a specific purpose.
Other approaches are broader in scope, like All Biota Inventories that focus on specific taxa worldwide, or are narrower in time and effort, like Rapid Biodiversity Assessments and 24-hour BioBlitzes (often used in emergency contexts and public outreach, respectively.
[13] Although several of the early efforts at systematic ATBIs have been discontinued, a new generation of biological inventories are drawing on the speed and efficiency of DNA barcoding for taxonomic identification.
A paper on integrating DNA barcoding techniques into tropical biodiversity research observed that “this kind of ultra-fine-scale examination of complex tropical ecosystems has required an enormous amount of sweat-equity support from the taxasphere — the collected global array of taxonomists, collections and their knowledge in mind and print.”[14] Barcoding can greatly assist in this task, at the risk of complicating it by revealing so-called ‘cryptic’ species, differentiated by their DNA but morphologically similar.
[14] One study estimated that the effort required to conduct an ATBI on a representative hectare of tropical forest in a ‘reasonable time’ would occupy 10-20% of the entire global workforce of systemists.
It is imperative that every effort is made to identify or describe specimens to species level collected from biodiversity assessments.”[4]The ATBI concept originated at a 1994 workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania.
[1] The workshop, organized by tropical ecologists Daniel Janzen and Winnifred Hallwachs, brought 45 systematists and biodiversity experts together to discuss the execution of the world's first ATBI.
There will also be calls for comprehensive ‘tree of life’ phylogeny programmes spurred on by availability of cost-effective molecular technology, and proposed as a matter of national urgency.
[5] The rationale for these and other areas was:“The increasing need of sound taxonomic information and expertise for the successful implementation of biodiversity policies and, especially, conservation management programmes has been expressed widely at European and international fora.
This 120,000-hectare (460 sq mi) network of protected areas became the focal point for a planning process that included Costa Rica's Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio), the Norwegian Agency for Development Corporation, the National Science Foundation, and international specialists from taxonomy working groups for hymenoptera, coleoptera, vertebrates, nematodes, fungus, and molluscs.
Involving the same collaboration with taxonomists as well as with Janzen and Hallwachs, this ATBI was a partnership between the National Park Service and a purpose-made nonprofit, Discover Life in America.
The largest of them is the combined ATBI of Mercantour National Park (France) and the adjoining Parco Naturale Alpi Marittime (Italy), but they also include smaller pilot projects in Germany and Slovakia.
[35][17] Launched in 2006, the Mercantour/Maritime Alps ATBI has inventoried over 10,000 species, with the help of over 50 researchers divided in 23 teams, from France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, Portugal Greece, and the United States.