Inordinate fondness, insurmountable deficiencies: Is mapping the world's parasites impossible?

The diversity of life on earth is, in itself, an obstacle to the study of macroecology. Of the 300,000 helminth parasites of vertebrates -- and an estimated 80 million or more of invertebrates -- most species are undescribed, and most of those are undiscovered. I’ll briefly show how conventional macroecological methods probably fail to estimate the true scope and global distribution of that diversity, and ask: Just how wrong are our global change forecasts, if they don’t account for the staggering diversity of parasites on Earth--and what might that mean for human health?