ASEANET comprises all 10 members of the ASEAN group - Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The ASEAN region has some of the richest and yet most threatened biodiversity on this Earth. The 500 million inhabitants within the nations of ASEAN continue to rely on this biodiversity for their livelihoods.
Less obvious is the contribution of this biodiversity to regional economies through environmental considerations. The immense value of microbial and invertebrae diversity remains largely untapped. Central to the conservation and sustainable use of this biodiversity is the availability of adequate skilled human resource and relevant supporting technological tools. Taxonomy and biosystematics provide the basic tools to inventorize this biodiversity, thereby providing the necessary access to existing biological information and enabling the generation of new information crucial to the conservation and sustainable use of these resources for national and societal development.