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Improving nomenclatural consistency: a decade of experience in the World Register of Marine Species
(2017)
The World Register of Marine species (WoRMS) has been established for a decade. The early history of the database involved compilation of existing global and regional species registers. This aggregation, combined with changes to data types and the changing needs of WoRMS users, has resulted in an evolution of data-entry consistency over time. With the task of aggregating the accepted species names for all marine species approaching completion, our focus has shifted to improving the consistency and quality of data held while keeping pace with the addition of > 2000 new marine species described annually. This paper defines priorities and longer-term aims that promote standardisation within and interoperability among biodiversity databases, provides editors with further information on how to input nomenclatural data in a standardised way and clarifies for users of WoRMS how and why names are represented as they are. We 1) explain the categories of names included; 2) list standard reasons used to explain why a name is considered ‘unaccepted’ or ‘uncertain’; 3) present and explain the more difficult situations encountered; 4) describe categories of sources and notes linked to a taxon; and 5) recommend how type material, type locality and environmental information should be entered.
Legal pluralism calls into question the monopoly of the modern state when it comes to the production and the enforcement of norms. It rests on the assumption that juridical normativity and state organization can be dissociated. From an early modern historian’s perspective, such an assumption makes perfect sense, the plural nature of the legal order being the natural state of affairs in imperial spaces across the globe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article will provide a case study of the collaborative nature of the interaction between spiritual and temporal legal orders in Spain and its overseas territories as conceived by Tomás de Mercado (ca. 1520–1575), a major theologian from the School of Salamanca. His treatise on trade and contracts (1571) contained an extended discussion of the government’s attempt to regulate the grain market by imposing a maximum price. It will be argued that Mercado’s view on the bindingness of economic regulations in conscience allowed for the internalization of the regulatory power of the nascent state. He called upon confessors to be strict enforcers of state law, considering them as fathers of the republic as much as fathers of faith. This is illustrative of the "collaborative form of legal pluralism" typical of the osmotic relationship between Church and State in the early modern Spanish empire. It contributed to the moral justification of state jurisdictions, while at the same time, guaranteeing a privileged role for theologians and religious leaders in running the affairs of the state.