New Zealand Inventory of Biodiversity Volume 1: Kingdom Animalia Radiata, Lopotrochozoa, Deuteromstomia

Together, the three volumes will list every one of the 55,000-plus known species of New Zealand’s animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms.

These 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 – the Catalogue of Life, a kind of online telephone directory.

To date, only New Zealand has compiled a checklist of its entire biota. Approximately 52% of this country’s species are endemic – found only in New Zealand’s 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 – including many of the naturalised aliens included in the survey – are important to New Zealand’s economy, ecology, and well-being.

Written for the advanced high-school and tertiary-level reader, these volumes are also intended to be a kind of ‘Cooks Tour’ of the kingdoms and phyla of life that will, it is hoped, provide an appreciation of the wondrous diversity of nature.

The three-volume work New Zealand Inventory of Biodiversity offers a first full review of the country's entire known species of animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms.' Paloma Migone, Waikato Times

Dr Dennis Gordon is a Principal Scientist at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, 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 international teams that are respectively co-ordinating the production of the Catalogue of Life and the World Register of Marine Species.

He is immediate past chairman of the Royal Society of New Zealand Committee on Biodiversity and a current member of the New Zealand Association of Scientists council.

In 2005 he was recipient of the prestigious New Zealand Marine Sciences Society Award for his lifetime contribution to the advancement of marine science in New Zealand.