This article explores how humanity has advanced its knowledge of biodiversity over time, from folk wisdom to modern databases. It highlights how technology has made information about life on Earth accessible to everyone and argues we should be optimistic about the future of taxonomy and conservation.

Alone in the forest, the modern person might find it difficult to identify a beech tree. Compared to indigenous shamans who forage thousands of medicinal plants, we are deeply disconnected from nature. But even if our personal understanding of nature is in decline, as a species, we’ve never known more about the natural world.

The fact is, while it is valuable, indigenous knowledge is often limited to the local area, difficult to distinguish from myth and ritual, and, if passed on orally, easy to lose. Literate naturalists faced similar problems. Aristotle recorded many species in writing, but much of his work was lost. Most traditional written research that survived to modern times is narrow in scope, disorganized, and spread throughout obscure tomes.

Over the last few centuries, humanity has transformed this scattered folk knowledge into a systematic account of life on Earth. And over the last few decades, we’ve made that knowledge accessible to everyone. After years of experience, the sharpest naturalists in history may have been able to identify a few hundred species in the field. Today, a ten-year-old with a smartphone app can identify millions with better accuracy.

The process began with Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish botanist whose magnum opus, Systema Naturae, forms the foundation of modern taxonomy. Linnaeus used a rank-based system to order life based on its physical structure. His system of kingdoms, classes, orders, families, genera, and species is still used today, though it has been significantly revised and expanded. By 1758, Linnaeus had cataloged and categorized around ten thousand species. As of 2020, that list had grown to over two million.

Our knowledge of life has grown deeper as well as broader. With little understanding of evolution or microbiology, Linnaeus only identified two kingdoms of life: plants and animals. Now, we know of seven (Plantae, Protozoa, Animalia, Chromista, Fungi, Bacteria, and Archaea), plus the strange world of non-cellular life (viruses and prions).

This knowledge is also becoming more reliable. In the past, since information about biodiversity was dispersed among many organizations and professions, organisms were often recorded multiple times under different names. In 2011, University of Hawaii biologist Camilo Mora estimated that 17.9% of species names were synonyms for the same species.

That is beginning to change thanks to the internet, which gave ri