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‘We dwell on a largely unexplored planet. ’ Edward O. Wilson, 1992 Beyond their material needs, people have always drawn great spiritual nourishment from the natural world. Indeed, for many people it is the moral imperative of careful stewardship that underlies their concern for the Earth’s biological diversity. The crucial message that we all depend on a healthy, functioning natural environment has received near- universal support. The links between nature and culture or recreations such as gardening or rambling are now firmly embedded in people's beliefs and understood in both rational and more emotive terms. In short, there is now fertile ground for widespread appreciation of biodiversity studies. However, the part played by systematic biology as the ultimate source of information about the natural world is not widely appreciated. This report by the UK Systematics Forum aims to explain to a wider audience the importance of the nation's outstanding reference collections (on which the discipline depends) and the fundamental contribution that systematic biology makes to our quality of life and understanding of the natural world. More ambitiously than that, this report aims to increase that contribution in the future by proposing a new way forward for systematic biology research in the UK. Drawing on discussions both within the systematics community and with major users of this research, priorities have been developed for action in three major areas of systematics:
Success in implementing the measures proposed here will depend on the active participation and collaboration of systematic biologists throughout the UK. This network of universities, museums, zoological and botanic gardens and other institutions mirrors the complex web of life that systematics itself aims to understand and interpret. Many of these organisations have an explicit role in education and the communication of science to the public. We hope that, by working together, they will be able to sow a wider understanding of the links between systematics research and society's interactions with, and uses of, the natural environment. This should encourage people to look to systematic biology for solutions to some of the world’s natural resource issues. In addition there can be a far greater appreciation that popular wildlife field guides are distillations of long- term research by the systematics community; that most of the cultivars in our gardens and kitchens were bred from wild stock originally collected by systematists; and that the wonderful nature documentaries we see on television are the most accessible apex of a painstakingly constructed pyramid of biodiversity information. The work of the UK Systematics Forum Committee, which comprises representatives of leading institutions in systematics, has been funded by the Office of Science and Technology. We should like to take this opportunity to give our thanks for their support. |
