standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

Asking participants for their views on whether and how the
centralization of taxonomic identification and collections might be realized,
he recalled the suggestion in his background paper (chapter 3, section 3.2)
that one museum with broad taxonomic expertise be identified for this
purpose. Then, if contractors wanted to generate diversity information or a
species list, they would send their collection to that museum. One possible
choice was The Natural History Museum, London, which had done much
work in the Pacific including the nodule-mining area.
Voicing the view of one contractor, a participant said there was an
obvious need to standardize information, but how to do this would vary for
different taxonomic groups, depending on how easy it was to classify by
genus and species. With mollusks, for example, when material was sent to
Guy Boucher at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, most of
the species were identified without a problem. Nematodes, with so many
species that would never be described, required a different approach.
Moreover, for a large group like the polychaetes, Gordon Paterson cold not
possibly identify them all by genus and species.
As to the suggestion for designating a single museum to receive
collections, she said that when she collected samples in the Pacific or
Atlantic she sent them to Boucher, who put them in the museum in France.
It would not be easy to ask a specialist to send a polychaete holotype to the
Smithsonian or some other natural history museum, although how to
handle a general collection of unidentified species was a different question.
A scientist working at a museum expressed the view that the
management of taxonomy should be done in one place, by one individual or
a small team that would know where the collections were going. It did not
matter whether the polychaete collection was in Paris or Washington or
London, because museums made collections available in any case. What
was important was that all the contractors from different countries have a
telephone number or electronic mail address where they could learn the
location. Someone had to manage this – perhaps coordinate might be a
better word – and he suggested that it be done in a museum, because that
was what museums did.
He also spoke of the need for taxonomic quality control. The
Natural History Museum, London, with 80 million specimens, was not
looking for new collections, given the expense of incorporating and curating
them forever in such a way that any specimen could be retrieved within ten
minutes. For taxonomic standardization, it did not matter who identified
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