California launches ambitious inventory of its hidden species

California is one of the planet's biodiversity hotspots, yet much of its life remains undocumented, unnamed, and unaccounted for. The California All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (CalATBI) is a statewide effort to catalogue this hidden life before it disappears.

Over the past several months, Mongabay has reported on CalATBI and its partners as they attempt something unusually comprehensive: to build a verifiable, statewide baseline robust enough to support decades of future decisions. It is not a catalogue of threats or a tour of charismatic species. Rather, it is a portrait of a scientific, institutional, and human infrastructure project designed to answer a basic question: what lives here?

Discovering What Still Lives Here

California has never lacked for ambition. Its 20th-century infrastructure projects, like dams, aqueducts, and freeways, are known for their scale and confidence. CalATBI belongs to that lineage, though its raw material is not concrete or steel, but beetles, spores, DNA fragments, and pinned moths.

The premise is straightforward: California cannot protect what it has not documented. Despite centuries of natural history, thousands of species remain undescribed, particularly among insects, fungi, and soil organisms. Many exist only as fleeting presences, active for...