Every Living Species Accounted For

In a world-first, New Zealand scientists have accounted for every animal, plant, fungi or micro-organism – more than 56,200 living species and 14,700 fossil species – ever to live in New Zealand over the last 530 million years and catalogued them in a three-volume inventory. The final edition of the NIWA-led New Zealand Inventory of Biodiversity launched this month at Te Papa. NIWA’s Dennis Gordon, who edited the inventory, said that made New Zealand the first country to catalogue ‘all of life through all of time’. It took 19 specialists a decade to complete the 1758 page review, he said. “Prior to this, New Zealand had a vast reservoir of undiscovered and unrecorded species.” The New Zealand Inventory of Biodiversity was associated with a worldwide Catalogue of Life initiative, which has described 1.8 million species of life.