The Australian Academy of Science and New Zealand's Royal Society Te Aparangi on Friday released an "ambitious" plan, endorsed by the world's most famous naturalist Sir David Attenborough, to accelerate this process over the next 10 years.

But, as Attenborough notes, the work of taxonomists and biosystematics experts is being strangled by a lack of investment and inadequate capacity "for the magnitude of the task" at hand to log living organisms, including plants, animals and bacteria.

"This has serious consequences for the future of life on Earth," Mr Attenborough said in the foreword to the academy's "Discovering Biodiversity" report.

The 2018-2027 plan encompasses all organisms in Australia and New Zealand - including islands, Antarctic territories and surrounding waters - as two of the 17 biologically megadiverse countries in the world.

"These countries comprise less than 10 per cent of the land area of the earth but are home to over 70 per cent of species," report lead author Dr Kevin Thiele, said.

Ninety-nine per cent of an estimated 500 mammals and 250 frogs in Australia and New Zealand have been named compared to just a third of the 225,000 insects, less than a quarter of 100,000 fungi and 19 per cent of the estimated 50,000 spiders.

Dr Thiele, a plant taxonomist, considers every extinct species a lost opportunity.

"Organisms have been doing research and development for billions of years and many of them have come up with extremely neat solutions to some problems," he said.

"We may find the key drug we need to cure multidrug-resistant tuberculosis or cancer in an organism, and if that organism goes extinct, how much of a loss is that for humanity?"

While naming a species won't prevent its extinction, it was a "first critical step" in reducing the possibility.

"Imagine a world in which there were no names for the things out there, for lions and tigers and eucalypts - it would be almost impossible to do many, many things," Dr Thiele said.

The report suggests a "strategic, focused and efficient" approach to identification, with species most relevant to conservation, biosecurity, pest management, human and animal health, and biomimicry to be targeted first.

"Microscopic fungi and bacteria, nematodes (roundworms), and many insect groups are amongst the most poorly documented of all organisms, yet they recycle nutrients in soils, control pests, cause and prevent disease, and hold enormous potential for industry, agriculture and medicine," the report reads.

The "crux" is to reach "hypertaxonomy" - naming and documenting all of Australia's species within a generation.

But the current and declining number of experts across Australia and New Zealand makes this task impossible.

"That's why we need reinvestment and we need to be able to substantially increase the rate at which we can get that done," Dr Thiele said.

"Fortunately new technologies are available to us, genome scanning, machine learning, big data ... which means that this very large task is certainly within our reach."

Australian Associated Press