The biodiversity of everything everywhere

In my last post, I mentioned I had a mission --- to achieve biodiversity wisdom through accumulating data, summarizing it as information, and then ultimately using that summary to generate knowledge by testing the information and data against our known "ideas". Two pieces of the puzzle that will help us achieve this goal are data portals where one can go and accumulate data about biodiversity, and tools like Google Earth that will help us visualize the data in such a way that we can see the patterns at multiple spatial scales, from global views to local views. The picture on your left shows the record density in Google Earth for Botta's pocket gopher. We accumulated the records of this species from the GBIF data portal (http://data.gbif.org), check to find out if the records have computer-readable geogrpahic coordinates (latitudes and logitudes, for example) and then counted how many of those records occurred in cells of different default sizes. You can try out a tool to create your own KMLs at http://ksord.colorado.edu/.

I need to spend a lot more time talking about the GBIF data portal, because I am sure it is very important - a lynchpin piece towards creating a global, collaborative infrastructure for biodiversity assessment (yeah, yeah, it is also the title of a paper I authored along with Andy Hill and Meredith Lane). This is not the post to do that.

Instead, I want to ask a simple question. If we can do something like show record densities on Google Earth and we know how to assess sample quality... why can't we ask the GBIF data portal what we know so far based on the 135 million biodiversity records in their database. Why can't we determine THE BIODIVERSITY OF EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE (SO FAR)?

What is stopping us?