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preceded its visit, and the concise and lucid oral summaries that SI staff provided. This material described the central part that SI plays in research on systematics, biogeography, the compilation of biological inventories, monitoring population changes, conservation biology, as well as other investigations of population dynamics, communities and ecosystems--the vast and diverse array of disciplines relevant to understanding and conserving biological diversity. More broadly still we learned about programs aimed at studying the biochemistry, atmospheric systems, and longer-term global processes of environmental change. These studies are fundamental to understanding the physical processes (many directly resulting from human activities) that are endangering biological diversity.

At the outset the Council wishes to emphasize its admiration for these programs. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), and the National Zoo, severally and collectively, are world leaders in these critical areas.

The gist of these presentations was to emphasize an acute state of crisis. Human activities are causing global changes of unprecedented scale over a very short time. We face the prospect of losing, during the next half century, half or more of the species with which we share the globe. Yet at present we lack even a centralized catalogue of these species--1.5 millions? 1.8 millions?--that have been named and recorded. And we remain uncertain, to within a factor 10, how many species there may be in total.

All this means that the study of biological diversity has a character different from almost every other study at SI. For the study of biological diversity is a discipline with a time limit.

The massive and accelerating attrition of species and ecosystem diversity constitutes an irreparable loss to humanity, a loss both of the world's natural beauty and of an immense measure of beneficial knowledge that could be gained from study of the biosphere in its full diversity. Even more ominously, the extent and rate of change in the biosphere greatly exceed our ability to gather information and conduct analyses that would enable us to predict their consequences for the biological and physical environments that sustain our own and other species. Without such information and analysis, and without public understanding of their implications, ameliorative measures must remain either misguided or inadequate, if they are undertaken at all.

Against this background, a number of suggestions and comments emerged from our discussion.

Many of the problems arising under the headings of biological diversity and global change cut across traditional bureau lines. Studies of diversity and evolution in marine environments that were separated only three million years or so ago by the Panama Isthmus tend to be conducted as separate programs by both STRI and NMNH. There is relatively little direct interaction between the STRI study of forest diversity on