Taxonomists have long dreamt of creating a master ‘catalogue of life’. For various reasons — lack of money and competing schemes for going about the job being the two most prominent — it has not yet happened. But the 1992 global biodiversity treaty may be a spur to further action.

Frank Bisby of the Centre for Plant Diversity and Systematics at the University of Reading, England, hopes that the Species 2000 project to federate as many as 200 databases into a single searchable archive of all the world's 1.7 million known species “is about to turn from a plan into a reality”.

Other groups with similar ambitions have signed on as partners, including the US-Canadian Integrated Taxonomic Information System and the Global Plant Checklist based in Australia and Europe.

Today, the prototype Species 2000 ‘dynamic checklist’ searches just three databases. But up to 30 links are expected by the end of the year. Bisby is also discussing links to the geospatial database created by the University of California at Santa Barbara's Alexandria Digital Library, so that species data could be combined with geographic information.

Funding so far has been “ridiculously fragile,” he says. But he is optimistic that the Global Environment Facility and the European Union will help pay some of the estimated $140 million cost of the basic (non-georeferenced) system.

Bisby and other taxonomists have been envious of the ample funding bestowed on molecular biologists, when “we think of ourselves as being of equal stature”. Chris Thompson, a US Department of Agriculture researcher and former vice-chairman of Species 2000, says: “We've just been ineffectual at selling our vision.”

Species 2000 is at http://www.sp2000.org