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incalculable increase in the rate of extinction. These developments are difficult to quantify because it is still unknown -- even roughly -- how many individual species of organisms presently survive. Such matters as rates of extinction through time are the subject of intensive, long-term studies by a multi-disciplinary program, the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems, at the Natural History Museum.
A comprehensive inventory of global biota remains a critical goal for science, but there simply are not enough biologists to carry it out. Accordingly, training becomes a critical priority for the near term, especially in the Third World. The training programs of the Smithsonian research bureaus are now coordinated through a newly-formed committee. Training workshops have been sponsored and coordinated by the Smithsonian with host country biologists over the last nine years in Guatemala, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Malaysia, India, China, and Thailand among others, and will be conducted in Morocco next year. The goal of this program is not simply to teach people or to offer western science and technology to the Third World but to encourage these countries to develop their own programs.
To learn more about what roles various organisms play in their "communities," the Smithsonian has scientists at its Tropical Research Institute in Panama and its Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, looking at how ecological systems function and respond to changes in the environment. In these locales, the Smithsonian work is distinguished by its concentration on long-term monitoring studies of the type that university-based biologists and geograpers are in a position to undertake.
Generally speaking, Smithsonian biological studies are not oriented toward the tropics, where the Smithsonian has longer monitoring record than anywhere else and can claim expertise in the functioning of tropical forests.