Corresponding author: Urmas Kõljalg ( urmas.koljalg@ut.ee ) © Urmas Kõljalg, R. Henrik Nilsson, Arnold Tobias Jansson, Allan Zirk, Kessy Abarenkov. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Kõljalg U, Nilsson RH, Jansson AT, Zirk A, Abarenkov K (2022) A price tag on species. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e86743 |
Species have intrinsic value but also partake in a long range of ecosystem services of major economic value to humans. These values have proved hard to quantify precisely, making it all too easy to dismiss them altogether. We outline the concept of the species stock market (SSM), a system to provide a unified basis for valuation of all living species. The SSM amalgamates digitized information from natural history collections, occurrence data, and molecular sequence databases to quantify our knowledge of each species from scientific, societal, and economical points of view. The trading system will necessarily be unlike that of the regular stock market, but the looming biodiversity crisis implores us to finally put an open and transparent price tag on symbiosis, deforestation, and pollution