Who Shall Be the Keeper of the Names?

Two centuries after Linnaeus developed his binomial classification system that brought order to the naming of species, there is still no universally accepted central authority for registering the names of life forms on earth. One and a half to two million species have been described and named. New discoveries are being made regularly. Internationally accepted rules for describing a species have been established by agencies such as the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) and the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT). Whatever name and description meeting these standards is published first, is the name that is accepted for the organism. Names can be published virtually anywhere. An officially accepted central registry of species names would be a welcome boon for biologists.

A listing of all the described species on earth may be a long way off or may never be developed. Various groups have projects under way to attempt it - or to create a piece of it. The International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) is the official journal of record for new bacterial taxa. Except for the bacteria, there are no complete central registries of published species names. ICZN has proposed ZooBank, "…an open-access, mandatory registration system for descriptions of all new taxa and nomenclatural acts in animal taxonomy."

Other groups are proposing their own solutions to the problem of classifying life. BioCode wants to merge the rules of the IAPT, the ICZN and others to create a universal standard for naming all types of taxa. uBio takes a different approach to the issue - it is creating a database connecting information on an organism to all names ever used for that organism.

In the end it will probably take the efforts of many of these groups to achieve the tremendous goal of a workable system to organize the names and descriptions of all known organisms.

Links:

• In the Classification Kingdom, Only the Fittest Survive from the New York Times


• ZooBank


• International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature


• International Association for Plant Taxonomy


• International Code of Botanical Nomenclature


• International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology


• The BioCode: Integrated biological nomenclature for the 21st century? by John McNeill


• Universal Biological Indexer and Organizer uBio


• ALL Species Foundation


• Wikispecies


• Species 2000


• Global Biodiversity Information Facility GBIF


• PhyloCode

Posted by Eric La Fountaine at 11:47 AM on February 24, 2006