Six steps for building a technological knowledge base for future taxonomic work.

Species are the principal category we use to study,understand,and conserve the natural world,so how we define species has a cascading impact across fields,well beyond biology[1].Despite such importance,debate on species con-cepts continues to this day([2]2020),with consequences for what organisms we recognize,study and protect.Given the wealth of life forms on our planet,achieving a universally-accepted concept seems impossible.If taxonomists wait for a universally-accepted concept,delaying their work on describing and delimiting species,we risk losing species to extinc-tion before they are named[3].