Despite their number and importance, they have remained one of the poorest known animal groups on our planet. Presently, expertise for the group is at the brink of worldwide extinction. In a joint program, P.Sierwald, an arthropod systematist at the Field Museum, and R.L. Hoffman, W.A. Shear and R.M. Shelley, the only remaining actively publishing millipede workers in the U.S., combine their expertise to train new millipede experts and to significantly advance the systematics of the group. The project will train students at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels.

The research will concentrate on the North and Central American fauna, which through this project will become the best-known millipede fauna in the world. Promoting millipede research worldwide is an important goal of this project. To make millipede taxa and associated data accessible to specialists and non-specialists, a Classification of the Diplopoda, an illustrated Key to Diplopod Families, and a complete Checklist of Diplopod Species recorded from North and Central America and the West Indies will be published in electronic form. The research team will also develop the diplopod pages on the Tree of Life to introduce millipedes to a wide and general audience.