While on the subject of grand challenges, The All Species Foundation has taken on the task of cataloging all of the species on the Earth.
Of course much of life on Earth is still poorly known and a good deal of it is going extinct in real time (probably at a greater rate after the last election). To get a grasp on the difficult of the task it should be noted that there are about 1.5 million known species (at least that is the commonly quoted number), but estimates of the total number of species range from 5 to 100 million with 30 to 40 million considered most likely.
At this point their search engine has more than 873,000 species indexed across a dozen databases. This is a very neat tool!
Even among known species there is a problem of taxonomy with specialists calling species by different names. People have built databases to go after this problem, but they are woefully incomplete.
6:33:20 AM 
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