ABSTRACT
As we rehearsed in the Introduction to this book, our long-standing colleague at the Natural History Museum in London urged us to embark upon a study of DNA barcoding in the early 2000s because he thought at that time that this innovation looked set to ‘rock the foundations of taxonomy’. As a cutting-edge environmental genomics technoscientific innovation combining ambitious promises for the future with what our colleague imagined would be a radical rewriting of taxonomy, BOLI immediately looked worthy of study. But enlarging this focus to consider the daunting global environmental and cultural challenges within which barcoding was emerging – biodiversity loss, taxonomy crisis, ‘authority-crisis’ for science, and changing practices and scales of knowledge production and use, to put it simply – made his suggestion hard to resist.
