Governance of Global Taxonomic Lists

• Field of research: Taxonomy
• Disciplines involved: Botany, Zoology, Mycology, Phycology
• Innovative activities: Developing a comprehensive global governance mechanism for aggregating global taxonomic lists
• Impacts on education: Provides an example of interdisciplinary collaboration as a way to tackle and resolve a particularly complex problem with far-reaching consequences for various scientific and non-scientific fields.

• Questions/ issues addressed by the project

  Competing taxonomies cause confusion and inefficiencies among many users of the science. Our primary question is therefore whether a global mechanism for the governance of taxonomic lists can be developed through discussion among taxonomists and users that provides legitimacy, consistency and clarity to users of taxonomic lists while continuing to foster innovation in taxonomic science itself.

• Outcomes expected 

  The project expects to strengthen existing institutions attempting to seamlessly coordinate taxonomic lists so that a comprehensive taxonomic list of the world's diversity is available to, and adopted by, major users of taxonomy across the globe such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its subsidiary agreements. Ultimately, it is likely that such a list would also be adopted at other international levels, and nationally because it would, through merit, become the world standard.

• Leaders: Stephen Garnett, Les Christidis, Frank Zachos, Stijn Conix, Kevin Thiele, Mark Costello

• IUBS National Committees involved in the project: Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Russia

• IUBS Scientific Member Organisations involved in the project:
  • International Commission on Bionomenclature
  • International Ornithological Union

Introduction:

A single global list of all life forms has been an aspiration of taxonomists since Linnaeus. In recent decades there has indeed been much progress towards this goal but there is a final body of work required to complete the task. In particular there is a need for a governance regime that can give confidence to the users of taxonomy that disputes are arbitrated in such a manner that taxonomic treatments are both internally consistent and reflect the best science. This project aims to develop that governance regime, bringing together lead taxonomists, principal users of taxonomy, existing aggregators of taxonomic lists and governance experts to ensure that there is a sole source of taxonomic authority to which users from around the globe can refer and that bears the stamp of approval from the IUBS.

Background:

Competing taxonomies are one of the most vexing issues in biology. The question as to which species list best represents current taxonomic thought is not only of academic interest, but has serious downstream consequences. This project arises from a debate about global governance concerning taxonomic decisions about species and the confusion and inefficiencies caused by having multiple taxonomic treatments of the same group of organisms. While the initial response from the taxonomic community was disquiet that academic freedom would in part be constrained, there was agreement that a solution needs to be found and that there is merit in completion of long-held ambitions to create a single widely-accepted global list of species names. Such coordination and communication would lead to cost-efficiencies and improved quality-control in taxonomy, thereby helping accelerate taxonomic revisions, understanding of phylogenies and evolution, and provision of identification guides to users of names in the conservation and wider science communities. A possible solution demonstrated by the marine biology community is a more centralised technical management of names managed and owned by a social network of hundreds of taxonomic experts. The challenge here is not technical, but getting specialists to cooperate for the greater good, and some institutions to support the technical infrastructure. We believe neither challenge in superable. This project seeks to bring the specialist communities together to chart a common vision for taxonomy.

Links with international programmes or networks:

Under the auspices of the ICB, the project will be presented to the Consortium for European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT), International Commission on the Taxonomy of Fungi (ICTF), International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), Organisation for Phyto-Taxonomic Investigation of the Mediterranean Area (OPTIMA), International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature (ISPN), International Commission for the Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) and Biodiversity Information Standards (Taxonomic Databases Working Group) (TDWG) at a session to be held at the centenary of the IUBS in Oslo in July 2019. A result of this workshop could be that we run an IUBS program with the object of establishing an International Committee on Taxonomy (ICT).