Hello fellow scientists, research scholars and others.

We all know that the state of species identification and classification in the world is very poor. More over, it is quite ironic that country's in the world which are tagged as "Developing", and those which are poor, have quite a big share of the world's biodiversity. But, the residents of course don't have resources and exposure to properly document the biodiversity in their region. Moreover, the governments more-or-less all over the world are performing very badly as far as biodiversity cataloguing and conservation is concerned.

Just imagine how much we are losing (in terms of important scientific data) with every passing second as species of organisms which could never even be recorded simply get extinct from the face of the Earth !

The Earth's biodiversity is more-or-less like a burning book, losing its pages at a rapid rate. The faster we act, the more we'll be able to read it!

THE EXTINCTION CRISIS

It's frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals — the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We're currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.

[Quoted from :biologicaldiversity.org]

With factors like climate change and urbanization, much of the world's biodiversity is crawling rapidly into the danger-zone.

CURRENT STATUS & SCENARIO

• Governments : Most of the governments are NOT giving adequate amount of attention to preserving or at least documenting the biodiversity of their regions. They are by definition more human and power centric than environment centric.
• Governments can't do much : Even if they wanted to governments most probably will fail badly in such an effort with so many species of organisms of vivid types waiting to be discovered, classified and documented.
• Lack of Awareness : People in general around the world are not aware of the current scenarios of climate change, global warming, biodiversity conservation etc.
• Lack of incentives : Everything takes time and effort. So, those who work seriously definitely deserve recognition and some monetory support which at present is a far cry.
• Lack of documentation : Whatever information is available is there in bits and pieces. There is no proper source where all/significant parts of information can be found.
• Lack of support : People who have the knowledge and who are willing to or are already working on the subject in isolated groups or at individual level often find themselves in a helpless situation due to lack of proper support from like-minded peers.
  For example, if you click a photograph of a bug, and you want to identify it, there is a good probability that even after days, months or even years of research on the net, you will never be able to identify it.

.........The problems further get worsened with too many synonyms for the same species meaning the same species is labeled and documented by more than one scientific name.
So, it might happen that you find one name in one book, another name in another book for your bug. Add to it the "poor documentation" syndrome (meaning that you are unable to find a relation between the synonyms you found), and you will more or less like to just die peacefully than put your head into such a thing!!

[Pixabay License]

SOLUTION

The only best and complete solution to this problem is working as a community. People need to organize.
Only community-based, organized and transparent efforts being put in by individuals and residents of any particular region can help completing the job efficiently.

How can Steemit and SteemSTEM.io play a role

Steemit is an open community of people. With proper systems put in place, I am sure we can gather all the hunting Steemians and work towards the common goal.
Why I think this is a good platform :

• Everything is open to all.
• In case of discovery of any new species, conflicts between the individuals can be resolved easily as everything is immutably stored on blockchain, and can be accessed by all.
• Efforts by Steemians can be easily incentivised using Steem.
• Like minded people can easily communicate using the discord servers.
• People can easily get in touch with experts round the globe who have the required knowledge, and vice-versa.
• Even those who aren't good at it can at least post the images of any organism they find interesting or different on let's say Discord, and then, any professional who has knowledge about it can get in-touch with them, and guide them on how to go about the documentation, or otherwise themselves do the work on behalf of them. In that case, they both benefit directly from it.

FUTURE

I guess if everything works well, we as a community will be able to contribute a lot to the global database of known species, and in general be of great help to the international scientific community in the true sense.

In short we will be able to know the story of our own planet better.

Thanks to all the readers...
Keep Organizing!!
M.Medro