Completing the Catalogue of Life:
collaboration with megadiverse countries

Frank Bisby
Species 2000 Secretariat, School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, UK

The global Species 2000 organisation has worked with its N.American partner ITIS to create a Catalogue of Life – a unified taxonomic index of all living species on Earth. In its 2006 edition, this has reached 880,000 species, approximately half of all known species.  The Catalogue comprises a synonymic species checklist, a minimal set of data for each species, and a taxonomic hierarchy that connects to the higher level taxonomy.  Species 2000 operates a federated system in which different sectors of the Catalogue are supplied by different expert taxonomic database organisations around the world, thus bringing experts from the whole taxonomic community into participation.  The 2006 Catalogue includes sectors for plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms presently supplied by 30 organisations.   

The phase 1 programme is based on linking separate taxonomic sectors for each group of organisms, that is global species databases (GSDs) that provide a complete or nearly complete globalised species checklist for the group.  This model has worked well for the programme up to now, but it also has several difficulties.  There are not sufficient GSD databases to complete the less well known groups by the target date of 2011.  The model does not take advantage of the excellent regional taxonomic databases, and it fails to reach the rich set of species being explored in the megadiverse countries such as China, Brazil, and S. Africa.

Species 2000 has now been experimenting with its phase 2 model, using its distributed system for connecting regional databases to its Dynamic Checklist.  In the new architecture regional databases are connected to hubs in megadiverse countries, and it is these that are connected to the global checklist.  This symposium session is the start of a programme to build a major component of the Catalogue of Life in China, one of the megadiverse countries.  The proposal is to collaborate in a ‘Species 2000 China’ connected system of Chinese taxonomic databases, to make a major contribution to the Catalogue of Life.

Keywords: catalogue of life, species checklist, taxonomic hierarchy, taxonomic databases, plants, animals, fungi, micro-organisms, taxonomy, organisms.