Taxon Expeditions

Description

Founded in 2017 and based in Leiden, The Netherlands, Taxon Expeditions is an organization which focuses on education and biodiversity discovery. We organize expeditions to remote areas for people interested in nature and science and help them make scientific discoveries. International experts are engaged to guide them through all the steps of real scientific research. Together, they discover, name, and publish completely new species of wild animals. Our mission is to harness the power of citizen science for biodiversity discovery and its conservation. In the 250 years that naturalists have been studying the living world, two million species of animals and plants have been discovered, described, and named. But scientists estimate that this is only 20% of the number that really exists. Most of the unknowns are small insects and other invertebrates. We offer the opportunity to help complete the inventory of the world’s biodiversity. We organize expeditions to the world’s biodiversity hotspots and train citizen scientists in field techniques for biodiversity discovery. With our expedition participants, we do inventories of the least-known animals of the world, and help to build local specimen collections for biodiversity conservationists and scientists. On all our expeditions, we make sure our work benefits local nature conservation. For example, in Borneo, we fund local conservation students who participate on the expedition free of charge. For every flight taken by our participants, we donate to Regrow Borneo, a tree-planting scheme that restores the riverine forest in the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary. And in Montenegro, we are developing field guides (books) to be distributed by the national park.

Contacts

ADMINISTRATIVE_POINT_OF_CONTACT
Menno Schilthuizen
email: taxonfoundation@gmail.com

POINT_OF_CONTACT
Maaike de Voogd
email: maaikedevoogd@gmail.com

Taxon Expeditions
Rembrandtstraat 20
Leiden
2311 VW
South Holland
NL
email: info@taxonexpeditions.com