Around $263 billion US dollars, if a new paper is to be believed.

I’ve wrote about the paper for Nature today and the story appears on their The Great Beyond blog. Head over there to read the full thing. Here’s an excerpt:

Based on a survey of 44 Brazilian taxonomists (representing 9% of the country’s total), the duo calculated the average cost of training, funding and equipping people in the field. This might seem like an unrepresentative sample, but Brazil contains 10% of the world’s animal species and the country’s taxonomists are among the world’s most prolific. Their salaries also come close to the global average for professors.

Carbayo and Marques found that the average researcher described 25 species in their career.