Over the last couple of days, we heard of all the areas and groups of animals that are being catalogued by scientists around the world. However, It seems to me that when we talk of biodiversity, most people only think of the mammals, the birds, the reptiles, the plants and anything they can see. What cannot be seen is not even thought of. So, I would like to see in the near future databases of bacteria, fungi and parasites. These are also living organisms and need to be given equal level of importance and funding opprotunities, compared to the other groups of organisms.

I agree on what you wrote. As far as we know micro-organisms are very important in ecosystems, in ecosystem services, and they ought to be an important part of biodiversity research and education.

Species level biodiversity informatics education was also neglected. There were strong bias towards citizen science. The final main title for one of the outbreak discussion groups was Engaging public. However, in the meeting itself, this theme was reduced to Citizen science. Plenty of important lifelong biodiversity education and learning is left out, if only citizen science is accepted to be discussed.

Best regards

Mauri

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Dr. Mauri Ahlberg FLS
Professor of Biology and Sustainability Education
University of Helsinki, FINLAND

I think bioinformatics, applied in the robust and integrative context we saw during the just concluded conference, is new. Before the conference, bioinformatics was reserved, essentially for molecular and related biological techniques/data sets. Taxonomists using traditional techniques felt there was a role for them to neither play nor a place for their data in bioinformatics. We found the same family of scientists not understanding the power of integrative research. Today, we know that various types of data sets (including images) outside of the molecular data are welcome in bioinformatics. This puts to rest, the well known disagreement between scientists employing different techniques in taxonomy.
The apparent bias for marco-organismsms is because of the real, immediate threat we all face and the urgency it requires to address sustainable development. The concern for microorganisms is not threatening. On the other hand, microorganisms spite of their ecosystem ecosystem service values are not facing dangers as immediate as we find in the macro-organisms. Indeed, bioinformatics has been widely applied in the study of microorganisms, particularly in foods and medicine.