Biodiversity Service & Application Tracker

ZooBank Thu, 01/17/2008 - 17:41

The scientific names of animal species are crucial to effective global communication about biodiversity, and hence its use and conservation. Without broad agreement on the name of a disease-bearing microbe, vital food species, or threatened animal, we can't even begin to combat, exploit or conserve them. So, in scientific language, humans are Homo sapiens and honeybees are Apis mellifera; and this is true all over the world.

The universal acceptance and adoption of a system for naming animals is an incredible achievement for mankind, and started in 1758 with the publication of the 10^th edition of Systema Naturae by the Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus. Exactly 250 years after the very day that the ICZN Code fixes the official start of scientific zoological nomenclature (January 1, 1758), the ZooBank Registration website was officially launched.

The ZooBank Registry is still very-much a work in progress, and will likely remain so over the course of 2008-2009. The development process is intentionally gradual, to allow the creation of a solid foundation with input and support from as much of the active zoological taxonomy community as possible. Several documents outlining various aspects of the history and development of ZooBank are available here.

The ICZN is especially grateful to Thomson Scientific, owners of the Zoological Record, for their help and assistance in creating an early version of ZooBank based on the Index to Organism Names. As ZooBank continues to grow during its early development period, you may wish to link to the current version of the Index to Organism Names - a much more comprehensive listing of zoological nomenclature, cross-linked to relevant literature. ICZN looks forward to a long and mutually advantageous relationship with Thomson Scientific.

TROPICOS Thu, 01/17/2008 - 17:37

W³TROPICOS provides new and improved access to the Missouri Botanical Garden's VAST nomenclatural database and associated authority files. In this release (rev. 1.5), the following information is provided when present (* indicates a hypertext link to additional information about a name or reference):

 

Names data

Plant name and authors

Group and family placement

Place and date of publication

Type information

*Basionym, with place and date of publication

*Next Higher Taxon, with place and date of publication

*Other uses of this name

*Synonyms of this name, and *References for the alternate usage

*Homonyms and *Infraspecific names for species

Reference

Author(s) of the publication

Date of publication

Title of the article

Journal or book title

Volume and page numbers

Keywords

International Plant Names Index (IPNI) Thu, 01/17/2008 - 17:35

The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) is a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of all seed plants, ferns and fern allies. Its goal is to eliminate the need for repeated reference to primary sources for basic bibliographic information about plant names. The data are freely available and are gradually being standardized and checked. IPNI will be a dynamic resource, depending on direct contributions by all members of the botanical community.

IPNI is the product of a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium

UBio NameBank Thu, 01/17/2008 - 17:40

NameBank is a registry for all recorded taxon names.

NameBank is a biological name server. It stores and serves NameBankIDs via Life Science Identifiers, a persistent and distinct identifier. Each NameBank LSID returns a NameBank object which contains information about the NameBank record.

 

It stores and qualifies recorded taxon names, providing an index for all name-annotated content. NameBank serves as a foundational layer for a name-based informatics infrastructure.

 

The basic unit of NameBank is the NameBank record which is referenced by a unique and persistentNameBankID. NameBank records are like index cards, recording basic metadata about specific distinct name string concepts. NameBank records form reconcilation groups based on objectively derived inter-relationships. 

SYNTHESYS NAD: Providing itinerary related datasets and tools (for integration, visualisation and quality check) Fri, 10/19/2007 - 09:30

The funtion of this service is to detect itinerary patterns in georeferenced primary data presumably collected during a collecting event.

GIS data downloads Fri, 07/27/2007 - 15:17

TDWG World Geographical Scheme - GIS Shapefiles v2.0 Fri, 05/25/2007 - 11:14

TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions

The International Taxonomic Database Working Group's world geographical scheme for recording plant distributions can be downloaded from this website as ArcView shape files for use in GIS. This is the first release of these dataset so there may be some errors. Please send any corrections to J.Moat@rbgkew.org.uk. Please see the metadata for more information on these datasets (contained with the zip file metadata.xml and metadata.txt). Also please read the disclaimer and copyright before downloading this data.