CONTENT - International Society of Zoological Sciences

S4 ICZ2008 - Abstracts
S5 - SYSTEMA NATURAE 250 - Current issues in animal nomenclature
1758: Binomen; 2008 Open, Enhanced Descriptions
Donat Agosti 1 , Terry Catapano 2 , Norman F. Johnson 3 , Richard Pyle 4
and Zhi-Qiang Zhang
1 Berne, Switzerland ; 2 Columbia University, New York, USA ; 3 Ohio
State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA ; 4 Bishop Museum,Honolulu,
Hawaii, USA ; 5 Landcare, Auckland, Nez Zealand
Linnaeus's goal for Systema Naturae was to have a synthesis and
catalogue of all species known at that moment together in one place.
It remained from its invention until today the ultimate reference.
Since all the knowledge of the species included was printed in a
single publication, it could be shipped easily, and used as the basis
of all the later work - and it had such a tremendous effect that we
cannot master its legacy: we do not have a Systema Naturae edito
2008, not even a list of all the described taxa.
Now, 250 years later, with the Internet we have the medium to
provide everybody access at once to all the taxonomic knowledge
about species (and of course anything linked to it), we can produce
e-descriptions shared at once by everybody, and assure that all edescriptions
are linked to a registry of at least all the recently
published names.
In this contribution we describe how such an e-description could look,
using examples recently published in Zootaxa and PLoS-ONE.
Issues are discussed regarding technical aspects (TaxonX XML to
produce semantically enhanced publications), Life Science Identifiers
(LSIDs) to link to external databases like ZooBank and GenBank,
specimen records or bibliographic citations, hosting of descriptions
on dedicated servers such as Plazi, building a descriptions archive
and distributing them; legal aspects regarding copyright, and how we
envision the future. A future that will include registration of taxonomic
names and descriptions, tight integration of descriptions with all the
underlying databases, and journal production workflow producing
semantically enhanced publications that can be harvested by robots,
and thus will be part of the electronic taxonomic knowledge sphere.
Finally, the development of the Code will be discussed in the light of
such tremendous opportunities, which will allow linking hundreds of
millions of pages and databases - and if the nomenclatural domain
is part of Web2.0, increasingly accelerated descriptions of the world's
taxa.
Freshwater animal diversity assessment (FADA) – a project
documenting biodiversity in continental aquatic ecosystems
Estelle V. Balian 1 , Hendrik Segers 1 , Christian Lévêque 2 and Koen
Martens 1
1
Freshwater Laboratory, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences,
Vautierstraat 29 B-1000, Brussels, Belgium
2
Antenne IRD, MNHN-DMPA, 43 rue Cuvier, Case Postale 26, Paris
cedex 05 75231, France
A consortium of more than 100 taxonomists has compiled data on
specific and generic biodiversity from all animal groups in inland
waters worldwide (*) . The diversity and distribution of vertebrates,
insects, crustaceans, molluscs and a suite of minor phyla is
compared. Whereas the available data on vertebrates and some
emblematic invertebrate groups such as Odonata (dragonflies and
damselflies) allow for a credible assessment, data are mostly
deficient for several other groups. This is owing to knowledge gaps,
both in geographical coverage of available data and/or lack of
taxonomic information. These gaps must urgently be addressed,
either by liberating date from inaccessible repositories or by fostering
further taxonomic research. A similar effort is required to compile
environmental and ecological information in order to enable crosslinking
and analysis of these complementary data sets. Only in this
way will it be possible to analyze information on freshwater
biodiversity for sustainable management and conservation of the
world’s freshwater resources.
Balian, E., C. Lévêque, H. Segers & K. Martens, 2008. Freshwater
Animal Diversity Assessment. Hydrobiologia 595: 637 pp. Reprinted
as Developments in Hydrobiology 198.
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The Catalogue of Life – an e-Science Systema Naturae for the
future
Frank Bisby
Species 2000 Secretariat, School of Biological Sciences, University
of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AS, UK
A significant success in the Linnaean enterprise was to synthesise a
single comprehensive taxonomic backbone that could be distributed
widely for practical use, and that collated a professional quality
catalogue of the entire span of organisms. In the modern world the
practical need for such a system becomes ever more pressing, as in
indexing biodiversity knowledge on the internet, documenting global
biodiversity as a whole, and for globalising biodiversity science in
relation to food, ecosystem biology and modelling climate change.
The Catalogue of Life is a global scale community-wide programme
intended to collate such a backbone using a distributed e-science
system, gathering expertise from across the taxonomic profession. It
is focused on establishing a sustainable and functionally complete
system that includes a species checklist and taxonomic hierarchy for
all known extant Plants, Animals, Fungi and Micro-organisms.
Bisby FA, Roskov YR, Orrell TM, Nicolson D, Paglinawan LE, Bailly
N, Kirk PM, Bourgoin T, van Hertum J, eds (2008). Species 2000 &
ITIS Catalogue of Life: 2008 Annual Checklist. CD-ROM; Species
2000: Reading, UK.
Documenting marine megabiodiversity
Philippe Bouchet
Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 57 rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris,
France.
With one-fourth of all described marine biota, molluscs are the
beetles of the sea. It is estimated that we currently know 80,000 valid
described mollusc species (53,000 marine), with a yearly increment
of about 580 species (350 marine). The shells of molluscs are both a
blessing and a curse. They are a blessing because the fossil record
of molluscs is exceptionally good, the global sampling of molluscs is
the best for marine invertebrates, and post mortem remains at
intensively studied coral reef sites show that 28% of the species are
simply never collected alive. Shells are also a curse. Shell collecting
has fueled taxonomic inflation, and there is a vast purgatory of
nominal species that have not been recently critically re-evaluated:
this is undoubtedly the main reason why there is not yet a world
register of mollusc species. Additionally, most mollusc species have
historically been named based on their shells alone - sometimes
even atrociously "beach worn". There is concern for a broadening
gap between documenting the molluscan diversity of the world,
which involves assigning names, and backing this exercise with
sound nomenclature. Admittedly, molluscan systematics is not the
only branch of zoology that suffers from the instability of names in
taxonomic limbo, but the magnitude of the problem is certainly
unique to malacology: there are probably 100-150,000 molluscan
species still to be named, and there is a graveyard of perhaps
100,000 nominal species based on name-bearing types of (very)
questionable taxonomic value.