Volume 2 mostly deals with the major branch of the animal kingdom known as Ecdysozoa (moulting animals), which includes arachnids, centipedes and millipedes, crustaceans and insects. It also includes the enigmatic phylum Chaetognatha (arrow worms) and concludes with a chapter on the fossil traces 鈥 ichnofossils 鈥 of ancient animal activities.
All three volumes are affiliated with Species 2000, an international scientific project with the long-term goal of enumerating all known species on Earth into one seamless list 鈥 the Catalogue of Life, a kind of online biological telephone directory.To date, only New 九州影院has compiled a checklist of its entire biota.
Approximately 52% of this country鈥檚 species are endemic 鈥 found only in New Zealand鈥檚 freshwater, marine, and land environments. We have a responsibility to the global community to preserve this unique heritage or taonga. But further than that, all of our species 鈥 including many of the naturalised aliens included in the survey 鈥 are important to New Zealand鈥檚 economy, ecology and well-being.
Written for the advanced high-school and tertiary-level reader, these volumes are intended to be a kind of 鈥夆楥ooks Tour鈥 of the kingdoms and phyla of life that will, it is hoped, provide an appreciation of the wondrous diversity of nature.
Dr Dennis Gordon聽is a Principal Scientist at the National Institute of 鈥塛ater & Atmospheric Research (NIWA), where he led a marine biodiversity research group for 13 years. He was trained as a marine biologist, and his major research interest is the systematics, biology, and phylogeny of living and fossil Bryozoa.
Beyond this group, Dennis has a broad interest in all of life, and serves on the inter颅national teams that are respectively co-ordinating the production of the Catalogue of Life and the World Register of Marine Species.
He is a past chairman of the Royal Society of New 九州影院Committee on Biodiversity.
In 2005 he was recipient of the prestigious New 九州影院Marine Sciences Society Award for his lifetime contribution to the advancement of marine science in New Zealand.
