ABSTRACT
Cross-cultural barriers, even those between scientists in different elds of study, can create scenarios where two well-meaning people both think they speak the same language and come away either having no idea what the other person meant, or worse, feeling condent they understand completely, and getting it utterly wrong. Business leaders have quite sincerely asked why we need so many species, ‘Why don’t you just pick the best ones and keep those?’ Even among scientists nominally studying biodiversity there is foundational confusion over the idea of what species are (Chapter 2). Other scientic disciplines are often unaware of the scope of the taxonomic knowledge gap-the number of global undescribed species is staggering, but most of us only talk about species that are already named. A further pressing issue is the global distribution of biodiversity, as the species and the scientic infrastructure to describe them are disjointly distributed.
