Randall "Toby" Schuh is the Principal Investigator for the Plant Bug Planetary Biodiversity Inventory Project (PBI). Toby is responsible for the administration of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) project grant, in which he heads a team of senior scientists, postdoctorals, and PhD students working on a group of about 3,500 species of Phylinae worldwide. Working cooperatively with other project collaborators, he is striving to organize the project to bring the reality of "industrial scale" taxonomy to life. This involves the creation, maintenance and design of web-based tools to allow for meaningful retrieval of information from literature, locality and image databases on the internet by systematists, ecologists, conservation biologists, natural resource managers, environmental scientists and the general public.

Principal Investigator Schuh was first exposed to the study of plant bugs while an undergraduate student working in the entomology museum at Oregon State University, Corvallis, under the guidance of John D. Lattin. Eight months of field work in South Africa with PhD advisor James A. Slater provided original material for his PhD thesis on Orthotylinae and Phylinae from Southern Africa. That work forms part of the base on which the plant bug PBI project will be built.

After receiving his PhD, Toby Schuh joined the research staff of the American Museum of Natural History in 1974. Since that time he has been a curator of minor orders, including the Heteroptera, and has served as chair of the Department of Entomology and the Division of Invertebrate Zoology. Through fieldwork, purchase, and gift, he has built on the superb collection foundations laid by his late colleague Pedro Wygodzinsky. As a result of that process, the American Museum now houses one of the largest Heteroptera collections in the world, with unexcelled coverage at the family level in all infraorders with excellent geographic coverage.

Toby has conducted extensive fieldwork in western North America, South America, South Africa, and Australia. In the process he has amassed one of the largest single collections of Miridae, with particular strength in the Orthotylinae and Phylinae. Much of the material is host documented and exists in long series.

The NSF-funded Planetary Biodiversity Inventory project provides a rare opportunity to document a large monophyletic group on a worldwide basis. The excitement of pursuing the project is matched only by the exhilaration of my first weeks and months as a junior curator at the American Museum of Natural History. The PBI combines the fascination of exploration and discovery of new or little known taxa through fieldwork, with the satisfaction of having the necessary resources to organize systematic knowledge on a scale seldom thought possible.