If variety is the spice of life, we face an increasingly bland future. There are perhaps 10 million species of organism on Earth, of which at most 1.8 million have been described. In some taxonomic groups, up to 20% of known species face extinction, and countless more are disappearing unnoticed. This should concern us all because we don't know what the consequences will be. In general, the less diverse an ecosystem, the less productive and stable it is. But ecologists are currently unable to make specific predictions that could help inform decisions about development and conservation.

If this is to change, we must reinvigorate taxonomy and describe the vast ranks of unnamed species. We need more passionate field workers, like Peter Ng of the National University of Singapore, whose efforts to catalogue neglected faunas are profiled on page 396. And we must ensure that the results of their endeavours don't languish on dusty shelves.

We also need to answer practical questions about the consequences of biodiversity loss. How many species are needed for an ecosystem to function? Will the loss of certain key species have disproportionate knock-on effects? This research must be done on appropriate scales of time and space: consider biodiversity over too short a time, or too small an area, and you can get the wrong answers.

Many interested scientists say gloomily that governments are not interested in this work. Given the stakes, this defeatism isn't good enough. Taxonomists and ecologists should look to the visionaries in their own midst, and to what their colleagues in genetics and climatology have achieved by understanding how to cast a research agenda in a light that can inspire — and if necessary, alarm — politicians.

Few have a clearer vision than Charles Godfray, director of the UK Natural Environment Research Council's Centre for Population Biology at Silwood Park, west of London. He argues that taxonomy must emerge from museums to become a web-based information science (H. C. J. Godfray Nature 417, 17–19; 2002). Some initiatives of this ilk are under way, but the call has been short-sightedly rejected by much of the taxonomic community, notably the Linnean Society of London.

Godfray was also instrumental in setting up one of the few long-term ecological projects investigating the consequences of declining biodiversity in a developing country where the problem is particularly acute. With backing from Britain's Royal Society, the Sabah Biodiversity Project in Malaysian Borneo is investigating ecosystem function and timber production in felled forests planted with varying numbers of species of dipterocarp — the main type of tree found in the rainforests of southeast Asia.

More projects of this type are needed, but they won't be forthcoming unless ecologists can take a leaf from the book of the geneticists whose lobbying in the late 1980s led to the Human Genome Project. There are parallels between the two research agendas. Like taxonomy, genome sequencing is purely descriptive, while the Sabah study of ecosystem function is conceptually related to systems biology, the probing of the function of gene networks that has followed in genomics' wake. Taxonomists and ecologists need to dispel the notion that their work — which involves dirty boots, rather than gleaming lab machinery — is somehow less scientific.

The cheerleaders of genomics promised gains in terms of human health and economic output. The economic consequences of ecosystem management are harder to quantify, but they are no less real: sustainable forestry, agriculture and tourism can all put developing economies on a sounder footing, to the benefit of us all.

Climatologists faced similar problems in explaining the economics of their case. After global warming was identified as a threat, some leading climatologists became highly effective lobbyists, pounding the corridors of power to stress the importance of their work. They won increased research funding and the establishment of the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So far, taxonomists and ecologists have failed to muster a comparable response to the galloping loss of our planet's biodiversity. It's time that they did.