Ornithological nomenclature is based on the bibliographic legacy from Charles Davies Sherborn, working in the Natural History Museum, London, and from Charles Wallace Richmond, working at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Despite their significant foundations, a complete data series has not yet been achieved. Gaps in their original coverage, though few, have not been resolved. The post-1850, the end date of coverage of the Index Animalium the level of completeness declines. I will discuss the coverage of the gaps in ornithology and address the primary issues of completeness and accuracy.
Avian names in the Index Animalium have issues of accuracy in spellings, authorship and citation details. Most of the problems that can be pinpointed in ornithology will be paralleled in other zoological disciplines. Post-1850, ornithology is fortunate in the correspondence between Sherborn and Richmond. The Richmond Index to the Genera and Species of Birds, published on microfiche in 1992 and now available online, is founded on their collaboration. After Richmond, successive members of the Department of Birds at the United States National Museum were inspired and encouraged to update the resource regularly. Over the years since 1932 when Richmond died there were periods when this card index was well maintained and others when less time was devoted to it. In addition, the information available to ensure it was comprehensive is likely to have been only marginally better in respect of the Americas than was available to the Zoological Record. There has been more deliberate work done to maximise the collection of avian generic names. The initial sustaining role played by the Zoological Society of London must be recognised as regards both the Zoological Record and the Nomenclator Zoologicus of Neave. Unfortunately, ornithologists have undervalued the importance of the bedrock of information that these initiatives provide and hence they have done little or nothing collectively to maintain and complete these resources.
The rare Book Room at the NHM holds what may be all Sherborn's Index Animalium slips. They are appropriately separated, but old explanatory separators written by Sherborn are fading and the original sequences within the segments look disturbed. These need study and potentially reorganisation. For their long term preservation and wider availability scanning is recommended (after any agreed reorganisation), It is hoped that the museum, whose Trustees were publishers of the 33 volumes that cover 1801-1850, will assess the situation and if necessary seek to raise funding for these measures. Other Sherborn material should perhaps be brought together with the slip cabinet so that all material relating to the Index Animalium is together or fully cross-referenced. At the Smithsonian, the Department of Birds holds two card indexes which Richmond created to support his primary card index. These are being preserved and are accessible on site.
Ziua limbii române 2014 - Caiet Program Emanuel Pope
În întâmpinarea zilei de 31 august - sărbătoare a graiului și culturii române,
„Ziua Limbii Române2014”
CAIETUL-PROGRAM AL
MANIFESTĂRILOR ȘI FESTIVALULUI DE
FILM
A presentation about war and the severe damages , how un human can war be .
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Ghandi
-Made by :Shahd Hamouri
Ziua limbii române 2014 - Caiet Program Emanuel Pope
În întâmpinarea zilei de 31 august - sărbătoare a graiului și culturii române,
„Ziua Limbii Române2014”
CAIETUL-PROGRAM AL
MANIFESTĂRILOR ȘI FESTIVALULUI DE
FILM
A presentation about war and the severe damages , how un human can war be .
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Ghandi
-Made by :Shahd Hamouri
Patients' experiences of health care provide invaluable resources for staff training and service improvement. This presentation describes the key points to consider when translating such experiences into story resources.
Come raccogliere i dati, classificarli ed inserirli in Openstreetmap; incontro con la Federazione Amici della Bicicletta di Genova tenuta il 5-5-2012 al Porto Antico.
EXPOZIŢIE DE PICTURĂ Promoţia 2009 Vernisaj – Vineri, 02.08.2013, ora 18,o...Emanuel Pope
EXPOZIŢIE DE PICTURĂ
Promoţia 2009
Vernisaj – Vineri, 02.08.2013, ora 18,oo, Sala Milleniului
A prezentat: Conf.Univ. BERTALAN KOVACS
A fost prezent Primarul municipiului Baia Mare, CĂTĂLIN CHERECHEŞ
Din partea CENTRULUI DE EXCELENŢĂ ÎN PROMOVAREA CREATIVITĂŢII ROMÂNEŞTI „PORŢILE NORDULUI” BAIA MARE
Au fost prezenţi MIHAI GANEA şi VIRGINIA PARASCHIV, coordonatori principali.
Chris Lyal - Taxonomy and the Web - integrating the piecesICZN
More and more calls for information about species
What is this?
What species live in my country / national park?
What species are eating my crops?
What happens to them if I manage the environment?
Patients' experiences of health care provide invaluable resources for staff training and service improvement. This presentation describes the key points to consider when translating such experiences into story resources.
Come raccogliere i dati, classificarli ed inserirli in Openstreetmap; incontro con la Federazione Amici della Bicicletta di Genova tenuta il 5-5-2012 al Porto Antico.
EXPOZIŢIE DE PICTURĂ Promoţia 2009 Vernisaj – Vineri, 02.08.2013, ora 18,o...Emanuel Pope
EXPOZIŢIE DE PICTURĂ
Promoţia 2009
Vernisaj – Vineri, 02.08.2013, ora 18,oo, Sala Milleniului
A prezentat: Conf.Univ. BERTALAN KOVACS
A fost prezent Primarul municipiului Baia Mare, CĂTĂLIN CHERECHEŞ
Din partea CENTRULUI DE EXCELENŢĂ ÎN PROMOVAREA CREATIVITĂŢII ROMÂNEŞTI „PORŢILE NORDULUI” BAIA MARE
Au fost prezenţi MIHAI GANEA şi VIRGINIA PARASCHIV, coordonatori principali.
Chris Lyal - Taxonomy and the Web - integrating the piecesICZN
More and more calls for information about species
What is this?
What species live in my country / national park?
What species are eating my crops?
What happens to them if I manage the environment?
Nigel J. Robinson - ZooBank and Zoological Record - a partnership for successICZN
Since its origin in 1864, ZR has had a close association with the taxonomic community, particularly with the Zoological Society of London. ZR was founded in 1864 by a group of scientists associated with the British Museum. It continued, supported by Society until 1980 when a partner was sought and BIOSIS took over production activities. In 2004, BIOSIS realised that with limited resources we could not achieve our aims and put our ideas into practice without further partnerships, so in January 2004, BIOSIS (including ZR) was acquired by the Thomson Corporation, and the new ownership is now starting to pay dividends. Over that 150 years or so, there have been difficult times, but ZR is still here and still has the same purpose it had in 1864 - to serve the community and disseminate taxonomic, biodiversity and zoological information for the benefit of scientific research.
This presentation discusses ZR, and the new free Index to Organism Names service which serves to demonstrate our commitment as Thomson to this initiative. I will also discuss how the partnership between ZR and ICZN might work from the ZR perspective.
Sherborn: Evenhuis - Charles Davies Sherborn and The Indexer’s ClubICZN
Charles Davies Sherborn was an indexer. And he followed a long line of indexers. And a longer line of indexers followed him. They/we are all members of “The Indexer’s Club”. A club of obsessed individuals who, for some weird reason, find it necessary to not only facilitate a semblance of order, but to make sometimes incredibly huge amounts of information available to others [sacrificing their social lives and labouring on what spouses and colleagues may consider esoteric projects in order to save others from the same work]. And in doing so, encumbering most of the day and the wee hours of the night with a passion and fervour few other human beings can even begin to understand. This presentation will explore the bits of Sherborn’s life that led to that passion for indexing; and touch upon the impact he has had on bibliographies and researching the dates of publication; upon nomenclature; and upon the indexing of names — and it will attempt to explain why he did this and where we all can go as a result.
Sherborn: Fautin & Alonso-Zarazaga - LANs: Lists of Available Names – a new g...ICZN
Article 79 of the ICZN Code, which appeared first in the Fourth Edition, outlines a procedure for adding large numbers of names to the List of Available Names simultaneously, as a Part of the List. This feature has gained importance with the development of Zoobank, because the LAN can be an important adjunct to or component of Zoobank. Article 79 describes a deliberative process, detailing steps for submission and for consideration by the public and Commission, and their chronology: submission must be by “an international body of zoologists,” and the proposed Part must be available for “comments by zoologists” for 12 months, followed by another 12-month period for comments on the proposed Part as revised in light of comments received. However, Article 79 it is mute about the contents of the submission. It is clear that adding a Part to the List will prevent long-forgotten names from displacing accepted ones – thus, for taxa on the List under the provisions of Article 79, nomenclatural archeology will not be worthwhile. Beyond that, Commissioners who participated in writing the Fourth Edition are divided about the intent of Article 79: some aver it is intended to document every available name within the scope of the Part, others it is to pare the inventory of names within the scope of the Part. The comprehensiveness of the names in the Part is critical because, according to Article 79.4.3, “No unlisted name within the scope (taxonomic field, ranks, and time period covered) of an adopted Part of the List of Available Names in Zoology has any status in zoological nomenclature despite any previous availability” (names may subsequently be added only “in exceptional circumstances,” according to Article 79.6). Under the first interpretation, the Part functions as a strictly nomenclatural archive. Under the second interpretation, the Part pares away nomina dubia, so Parts of the List resulting from actions under Article 79 are like the Approved Lists of Bacterial Names that took effect on 1 January 1980 – taxonomically recognizable as well as nomenclaturally available. It is critical that a consistent basis for implementing Article 79 be adopted; it is unrealistic to expect unanimity, given the diversity of opinion among those who helped craft Article 79.
Sherborn: Scholz - BHL-Europe: Tools and Services for Legacy Taxonomic Litera...ICZN
Literature research is the base for the scientific work of taxonomists. Therefore, large and well-curated natural history libraries are a very important prerequisite to carry out scientific projects efficiently. The library work, however, has several serious limitations that slow down the work significantly. The natural history library corpus is highly fragmented and scattered. In particular much of the early published literature is rare or is only available in a very few libraries. A lot of time and effort is involved to find and collect all scientific works that are necessary for a specific project.
Today, quick and easy access to digital literature is more and more important to facilitate scientific work. Over the last few years a large number of library resources for taxonomists have been made available online. Since 2007, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) project is digitising the biodiversity literature holdings of numerous libraries in the UK and USA and making them available on the internet.
Since 2009, the eContentplus project Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) is developing four different access routes to the biodiversity literature digitised by many European and global partners over the last years. With the Global References Index to Biodiversity (GRIB, http://grib.gbv.de/), BHL-Europe provides in collaboration with the EDIT project a union catalogue of library holdings of many European and US libraries. This will facilitate the search for literature, either digitised or not. This tool will also facilitate the management of digitisation projects all over the world and collect scan request from the scientific community. For an effective access to already digitised literature, BHL-Europe is building a multilingual portal for the scientific community. This portal will also have functionalities currently not available in the BHL portal. The BHL-Europe Portal will, for example, facilitate the search for common and scientific names of biological organisms as well as person names through the implementation of various webservices (e.g. Catalogue of Life, VIAF). The backbone of the portal is a preservation and archive system built on a customised storage infrastructure housed by the Natural History Museum in London. We are currently collecting digitised literature from 27 different content providers on our servers, including all the content that is currently available through the BHL portal (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org). In order to serve also a broader audience, the digitised literature available by BHL-Europe is also accessible by Europeana, Europe's digital library, archive and museum (http://www.europeana.eu/).
To date, most digitisation of taxonomic literature has led to a more or less simple digital copy of a paper original – the output has effectively been an electronic copy of a traditional library. While this has increased accessibility of publications through internet access, for many scientific papers the means of indexing and locating them is much the same as with traditional libraries. OCR and born-digital papers allow use of web search engines to locate instances of taxon names and other terms, but OCR efficiency in recognising names is still relatively poor, people’s ability to use search engines effectively is mixed, and many papers cannot be directly searched. Instead of building digital analogues of traditional publications, we should consider what properties we require of future taxonomic information access. Ideally the content of each new digital publication should be accessible in the context of all previous published data, and the user able to retrieve nomenclatural, taxonomic and other data / information in the form required without having to scan all of the original paper and extract target content manually. This opens the door to dynamic linking of new content with extant systems – automatic population and updating of taxonomic catalogues, ZooBank and faunal lists, all descriptions of a taxon and its children instantly accessible with a single search, comparison of classifications used in different publications, and so on. The means to do this is currently marking up content into XML, the more atomised the mark-up the greater the possibilities for data retrieval and integration. Mark-up requires XML that accommodates the required content elements and is interoperable with other XML schemas, and there are now several written to do this, particularly TaxPub, taxonX and taXMLit, the last of these being the most atomised. Building on earlier systems for mark-up of legacy literature ViBRANT is developing a new workflow and seeking to increase the automated component of the process. Manual and automatic data and information retrieval is demonstrated by projects such as INOTAXA and Plazi. As we move to creating and using taxonomic products through the power of the internet, we need to ensure the output, while satisfying the requirements of the Code, is fit for purpose in the future.
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Introduction to AI for Nonprofits with Tapp NetworkTechSoup
Dive into the world of AI! Experts Jon Hill and Tareq Monaur will guide you through AI's role in enhancing nonprofit websites and basic marketing strategies, making it easy to understand and apply.
A Strategic Approach: GenAI in EducationPeter Windle
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Generative AI, Image Generators and Large Language Models have had a dramatic impact on teaching, learning and assessment over the past 18 months. The most immediate threat AI posed was to Academic Integrity with Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) focusing their efforts on combating the use of GenAI in assessment. Guidelines were developed for staff and students, policies put in place too. Innovative educators have forged paths in the use of Generative AI for teaching, learning and assessments leading to pockets of transformation springing up across HEIs, often with little or no top-down guidance, support or direction.
This Gasta posits a strategic approach to integrating AI into HEIs to prepare staff, students and the curriculum for an evolving world and workplace. We will highlight the advantages of working with these technologies beyond the realm of teaching, learning and assessment by considering prompt engineering skills, industry impact, curriculum changes, and the need for staff upskilling. In contrast, not engaging strategically with Generative AI poses risks, including falling behind peers, missed opportunities and failing to ensure our graduates remain employable. The rapid evolution of AI technologies necessitates a proactive and strategic approach if we are to remain relevant.
The simplified electron and muon model, Oscillating Spacetime: The Foundation...RitikBhardwaj56
Discover the Simplified Electron and Muon Model: A New Wave-Based Approach to Understanding Particles delves into a groundbreaking theory that presents electrons and muons as rotating soliton waves within oscillating spacetime. Geared towards students, researchers, and science buffs, this book breaks down complex ideas into simple explanations. It covers topics such as electron waves, temporal dynamics, and the implications of this model on particle physics. With clear illustrations and easy-to-follow explanations, readers will gain a new outlook on the universe's fundamental nature.
Executive Directors Chat Leveraging AI for Diversity, Equity, and InclusionTechSoup
Let’s explore the intersection of technology and equity in the final session of our DEI series. Discover how AI tools, like ChatGPT, can be used to support and enhance your nonprofit's DEI initiatives. Participants will gain insights into practical AI applications and get tips for leveraging technology to advance their DEI goals.
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Explore how micro-credentials are transforming Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) with this comprehensive slide deck. Discover what micro-credentials are, their importance in TVET, the advantages they offer, and the insights from industry experts. Additionally, learn about the top software applications available for creating and managing micro-credentials. This presentation also includes valuable resources and a discussion on the future of these specialised certifications.
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June 3, 2024 Anti-Semitism Letter Sent to MIT President Kornbluth and MIT Cor...Levi Shapiro
Letter from the Congress of the United States regarding Anti-Semitism sent June 3rd to MIT President Sally Kornbluth, MIT Corp Chair, Mark Gorenberg
Dear Dr. Kornbluth and Mr. Gorenberg,
The US House of Representatives is deeply concerned by ongoing and pervasive acts of antisemitic
harassment and intimidation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Failing to act decisively to ensure a safe learning environment for all students would be a grave dereliction of your responsibilities as President of MIT and Chair of the MIT Corporation.
This Congress will not stand idly by and allow an environment hostile to Jewish students to persist. The House believes that your institution is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the inability or
unwillingness to rectify this violation through action requires accountability.
Postsecondary education is a unique opportunity for students to learn and have their ideas and beliefs challenged. However, universities receiving hundreds of millions of federal funds annually have denied
students that opportunity and have been hijacked to become venues for the promotion of terrorism, antisemitic harassment and intimidation, unlawful encampments, and in some cases, assaults and riots.
The House of Representatives will not countenance the use of federal funds to indoctrinate students into hateful, antisemitic, anti-American supporters of terrorism. Investigations into campus antisemitism by the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Committee on Ways and Means have been expanded into a Congress-wide probe across all relevant jurisdictions to address this national crisis. The undersigned Committees will conduct oversight into the use of federal funds at MIT and its learning environment under authorities granted to each Committee.
• The Committee on Education and the Workforce has been investigating your institution since December 7, 2023. The Committee has broad jurisdiction over postsecondary education, including its compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, campus safety concerns over disruptions to the learning environment, and the awarding of federal student aid under the Higher Education Act.
• The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating the sources of funding and other support flowing to groups espousing pro-Hamas propaganda and engaged in antisemitic harassment and intimidation of students. The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is the principal oversight committee of the US House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time” under House Rule X.
• The Committee on Ways and Means has been investigating several universities since November 15, 2023, when the Committee held a hearing entitled From Ivory Towers to Dark Corners: Investigating the Nexus Between Antisemitism, Tax-Exempt Universities, and Terror Financing. The Committee followed the hearing with letters to those institutions on January 10, 202
How to Build a Module in Odoo 17 Using the Scaffold MethodCeline George
Odoo provides an option for creating a module by using a single line command. By using this command the user can make a whole structure of a module. It is very easy for a beginner to make a module. There is no need to make each file manually. This slide will show how to create a module using the scaffold method.
3. OVERVIEW
• What are the foundations in ornithology?
• What are the major gaps?
4. OVERVIEW
• What are the foundations in ornithology?
• What are the major gaps?
• Have we actively sought to fill the gaps?
5. OVERVIEW
• What are the foundations in ornithology?
• What are the major gaps?
• Have we actively sought to fill the gaps?
• What have we done to fill them?
6. OVERVIEW
• What are the foundations in ornithology?
• What are the major gaps?
• Have we actively sought to fill the gaps?
• What have we done to fill them?
• How substantial a problem do we still have?
9. Documentation of ornithology
• Our knowledge of numbers of species of birds
achieved what was considered to have reached a
high level of completeness by the mid 20th century.
• Three very outstanding works document much of
what we know but each suffers from a drawback.
• Nonetheless by 1960 or so we had much of a strong
if not solid and comparable foundation.
11. Quantitative gaps
• We generally presume near total completeness in
our awareness of new names for birds prior to
1851
• I believe that there have been relatively few
failures to record new names from then till about
1960, but that proportionately slightly more will
have been missed from 1961 to 1995.
• However, the computerised databases we have are
not geared to provide synonymies.
12. Some reasons
• Cultural and developmental differences have played
a role.
• Historically almost all names were proposed in what
we now term developed countries.
• Politics and languages can present barriers.
• Recently the fundamental problem has been a lack of
vision: institutional compilation efforts have
dwindled and perhaps lapsed.
13. Qualitative gaps
• Inaccurate dates
– e.g. citations from later texts; publishing practices;
unsolved problems relating to
part-works; mistaken attributions of first
authorship etc.
• Inaccurate authorship data
• Inaccurate spellings of names
14. This is the back of a rare
wrapper from an August
1821 issue of a part
work; the plates with it
carried French
vernacular names only.
Temminck provided
texts only in 1823.
Sherborn usually cited
new names from the
later text.
15. First state (June) Second state (Nov)
Proc. Zool. Soc. London 1887, p. 558
18. Rather sporadically!
• Significant efforts up to the 1930s.
– Richmond, Sherborn, Mathews and Zimmer
• Since then a tight focus on listing taxa seen as valid
was expressed in name-specific efforts.
• Publication-focussed work has received renewed
attention in the last fifteen years or so.
19. Name-specific efforts
• The Peters’s Check-list volumes listed only recent
synonyms (e.g. not repeating older synonymy)
20. Name-specific efforts
• The Peters’s Check-list volumes listed only recent
synonyms (e.g. not repeating older synonymy)
• Subsequent world Checklists (e.g. those by Sibley &
Monroe, Clements, and Howard & Moore) gave no
authors, dates or citations (and had no synonyms)
21. Name-specific efforts
• The Peters’s Check-list volumes listed only recent
synonyms (e.g. not repeating older synonymy)
• Subsequent world Checklists (e.g. those by Sibley &
Monroe, Clements, and Howard & Moore) gave no
authors, dates or citations (and had no synonyms)
• The 2003 edition of Howard & Moore added authors
and dates and post-Peters names including synonyms
had linked citations.
23. Synonym-specific work
• The most complete source certainly up to the
mid 20th century is the Richmond Index.
24. Synonym-specific work
• The most complete source certainly up to the mid
20th century is the Richmond Index.
• However this is a source only. Each card uses the
original combination of the name and no subsequent
combination is recorded.
• No card links a synonym to a name in use.
25. Synonym-specific work
• The most complete source certainly up to the mid
20th century is the Richmond Index.
• However this is a source only. Each card uses the
original combination of the name and no subsequent
combination is recorded.
• No card links a synonym to a name in use.
• No hierarchical list of synonyms has yet been
completed. Such lists (for genus-group names and for
species-group names) are sorely needed.
27. Species-group names
• We guess that there may be 120,000 ± 20% avian
names to be registered retrospectively in ZooBank.
Perhaps 29,000 are in use for recognized taxa. Of
the rest, all synonyms, perhaps another 40,000 are
in held in databases. The rest have just not got
there.
• Causes: the diminution and eventual virtual
cessation of comprehensive “card indexing”; lack of
leadership; poor understanding of the gaps in the
basic works.
28. Genus-group names
A similar guess suggests that some 17,000 generic
names have been proposed.
While this may seem slightly bizarre at 1.7 per
species, many will be subjective junior synonyms
within ‘species-rich’ genera, and therefore
available for use, following the splits required by
recent molecular studies.
Currently only amateur databases.
29. Family-group names
Bock (1994) tabulated a total of 276 accepted avian
family names and another 1052 synonyms at
family-group level. Between 1860 and 1993 only 70
accepted ones were added.
Since then and not least due to molecular studies a
substantial number of names has been proposed.
Difficulties in locating some old works still needs to
be overcome to allow creation of a LAN that can
achieve consensual support.
30. The main sources
• Sherborn’s legacy: how much in the cards is not in
Index Animalium? How secure are these and is there
any back-up if they should be lost?
• The Richmond Index: scanned, but enquiries suggest
there is no claim to its having been constantly added
to in full over the years, especially recently.
• The “Reftax” database (MNHN, Paris): held integral
citational data. Abandoned!
31. The history of collaboration
• Good! Sherborn and Richmond exchanged letters
and Mathews was in contact with both men.
32. The history of collaboration
• Good! Sherborn and Richmond exchanged letters
and Mathews was in contact with both men.
• No evidence noted recently of any collective project
to ensure new names in ornithology are collected.
33. The history of collaboration
• Good! Sherborn and Richmond exchanged letters
and Mathews was in contact with both men.
• No evidence noted recently of any collective project
to ensure new names in ornithology are collected.
• Reliance has been placed on the Zoological Record
which alone does not suffice.
34. The history of collaboration
• Good! Sherborn and Richmond exchanged letters
and Mathews was in contact with both men.
• No evidence noted recently of any collective project
to ensure new names in ornithology are collected.
• Reliance has been placed on the Zoological Record
which alone does not suffice.
• No apparent evidence of leadership from the IOC,
the BOU, the AOU, or anyone else.
35. The history of collaboration
• Good! Sherborn and Richmond exchanged letters
and Mathews was in contact with both men.
• No evidence noted recently of any collective project
to ensure new names in ornithology are collected.
• Reliance has been placed on the Zoological Record
which alone does not suffice.
• No apparent evidence of leadership from the IOC,
the BOU, the AOU, or anyone else.
• Computers have brought little collaboration.
38. The present situation
• Very few alpha-taxonomists.
• Interest in nomenclature as a subject minimal.
39. The present situation
• Very few alpha-taxonomists.
• Interest in nomenclature as a subject minimal.
• Key databases now “amateur efforts”.
40. The present situation
• Very few alpha-taxonomists.
• Interest in nomenclature as a subject minimal.
• Key databases now “amateur efforts”.
• Availability of time and funds modest.
41. The present situation
• Very few alpha-taxonomists.
• Interest in nomenclature as a subject minimal.
• Key databases now “amateur efforts”.
• Availability of time and funds modest.
• Lack of encouragement from internationally
recognised leading professionals. Mayr is missed!
44. Future collaboration
• BHL shows collaboration is possible.
• Ornithology must embrace ZooBank.
• Lists of Available Names.
45. Future collaboration
• BHL shows collaboration is possible.
• Ornithology must embrace ZooBank.
• Lists of Available Names.
• Validation of ZooBank Registration (especially
retrospective registration).
46. Future collaboration
• BHL shows collaboration is possible.
• Ornithology must embrace ZooBank.
• Lists of Available Names.
• Validation of ZooBank Registration (especially
retrospective registration).
• Without a degree of funding the quality of this will
never be thoroughly reliable and will be many years
in achievement.
47. Conclusions
• Ornithologists’ lost the plot as regards
building and maintaining nomenclators.
• The advent of computers coincided with
the minimalization of names but
encouraged keen amateurs to step in.
• Thus such work as has been done is of
limited value. The quality control behind it
is rarely well documented. Thus all
retrospective registration of avian names
in ZooBank will need to be validated from
the original publication.
48. The Sherborn ‘slips’ an appeal
• Without support from the NHM Sherborn would
probably never have completed Part II of the Index
Animalium.
• Most, perhaps all, of his slips, are held in the NHM Rare
Book Room. Their organisation needs careful study by
one or more bibliographers and will definitely yield
some new information and perhaps explanations for
some curious changes in his use of dates.
• The NHM is urged to arrange such study and then to
determine the best option for the continued
preservation of the slips and other related
Sherborniana, all appropriately housed.
Editor's Notes
Quote 1: “Yet I doubt that more than 20 new species of birds will be discovered in the next ten years” (Mayr, 1957: 35). This followed his review of the period 1941 to 1955 when 49 new forms were ‘pronounced’ (an average of 2.5 per year).Notes: this was not to be so: 36 were described in the first ten of those 20 years and at least 28 more in the period 1966 to 1975. Refs. Mayr. 1971 and Mayr & Vuilleumier (1983) In the five years from 1976 to 1980 at least 12 newly proposed ones were seen as valid ( Vuilleumier & Mayr, 1987) and between 1981 and 1990 another 24, of 43 proposed, were accepted (Vuilleumier, LeCroy & Mayr, 1992).The rate of perceived discovery of new species seemed nonetheless to have fallen from 6 per year i n 1938-1941 (a short sample period) to 2.4 species per year. The rate of discovery since 1990 then has apparently been broadly sustained. However in the context of general acceptance of some 9600 to 10000 species the annual rate of addition is just 0.02%
The advent of computers and the Internet should have made things easier and for individuals that is true. There are now very few alpha-taxonomists among professional ornithologists and there is a much reduced understanding of nomenclature and its importance.Ornithology has, perhaps understandably in the circumstances, lost a place at the table of ICZN Commissioners. The effect of this seems to have been to exacerbate the problem. Within institutions cost constraints have caused a tight focus on the identification of return on the salary costs invested. Collection managers now often lack field collection experience and thus miss out on the learning that goes with writing up a collection in the context of a research report with a consequent limitation to their involvement in alpha-taxonomy. Higher paid professional ornithologists find work in studies of behaviour, ecology and conservation and, more recently, molecular studies to which many come with strength in their understanding of the techniques that they need but weakness in their foundational knowledge in taxonomy and nomenclature.Almost none of these professionals are permitted professional time to build or maintain nomenclatural databases in ornithology.
All three of these concerns could be materially assisted by removing ambiguity from the Code, adding extra subsidiary Articles or adding Examples.The consequence of these concerns arising from the Code is that well-intentioned amateur compilers perceive differing answers to the same questions and can find no way to obtain case by case determinations that will be generally accepted thus there will continue to be parallel usage of differing dates, of different authors and of differing spellings.Gender agreement may or may not be part of the problem: if it is it does not appear to be hard to manage it.The development of ZooBank will do much to resolve these issues. Lists of Available Names should also contribute to greater consistency but the current situation will make validation of retrospective registration of names controversial.This is as much an opportunity to serve the zoological community by improving the Code as it is a problem.