No Name, No Game

  • In an interesting contribution Joppa et al. (2011) revisit some aspects of the taxonomic impediment (Evenhuis 2007; http://www.cbd.int/gti/) and come to the conclusion that, contrary to the generally accepted idea, both the rates of species description and the number of taxonomists have increased exponentially since the 1950’s. Joppa et al. (2011) also note a marked decline in the number of species described per taxonomist which they attribute to the difficulty of finding new species in an ever declining ‘missing species pool’. Therefore, their results might be interpreted that today’s taxonomic workforce is sufficient to describe the remaining (shallow) ‘pool of missing species’. In this contribution, we question if this is indeed the case and propose a solution for speeding up taxonomic descriptions.

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Metadaten
Author:Yves Samyn, Olivier De Clerck
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-326622
DOI:https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2012.10
Parent Title (English):European journal of taxonomy : 10
Series (Serial Number):European journal of taxonomy : EJT (10)
Publisher:Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle
Place of publication:Paris
Document Type:Part of Periodical
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2012/03/27
Date of first Publication:2012/03/27
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2013/12/13
Tag:taxonomy
Page Number:3
First Page:1
Last Page:3
HeBIS-PPN:362667047
Dewey Decimal Classification:5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 59 Tiere (Zoologie) / 590 Tiere (Zoologie)
Sammlungen:Sammlung Biologie / Sondersammelgebiets-Volltexte
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 3.0