ZooKeys 550: Anchoring Biodiversity Information From Sherborn to the 21st Century and Beyond

About this book

Names are our primary framework for organizing information on the living world. But how do we tie scientific names to a foundation so they provide stability and repeatability to otherwise fluid conceptual topics such as taxonomies? Biodiversity informatics aims to solve this issue, and its founding father was Charles Davies Sherborn. His magnum opus z provided the bibliographic foundation for current zoological nomenclature. In the 43 years he spent working on this extraordinary resource, he anchored our understanding of animal diversity through the published scientific record. No work has equaled it and it is still in current, and critical, use.

Anchoring Biodiversity Information celebrates Sherborn, his contributions, context and the future for the discipline of biodiversity informatics. The papers in this volume fall into three general areas. Papers in the first section present facets of Sherborn as a man, scientist and bibliographer, and describe the historical context for taxonomic indexing from the 19th century to today. Papers in the second section discuss current tools and innovations for bringing legacy biodiversity information into the modern age. The final section tackles the future of biological nomenclature, including digital access, innovative publishing models and the changing tools and sociology needed for communicating taxonomy.

Contents

1    Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond
    Ellinor Michel

Sherborn – person, scientist, bibliographer and context

13    Charles Davies Sherborn and the “Indexer’s Club”
    Neal L. Evenhuis

33    A magpie with a card-index mind – Charles Davies Sherborn 1861–1942
    Karolyn Shindler

57    Naming and Necessity: Sherborn’s Context in the 19th Century
    Gordon McOuat

71    Sherborn’s foraminiferal studies and their influence on the collections at the Natural History Museum, London
    C. Giles Miller

83    ‘Where is the damned collection?’ Charles Davies Sherborn’s listing of named natural science collections and its successors
    Michael A. Taylor

107    Reinforcing the foundations of ornithological nomenclature: Filling the gaps in Sherborn’s and Richmond’s historical legacy of bibliographic exploration
    Edward C. Dickinson

135    Sherborn’s influence on Systema Dipterorum
    F. Christian Thompson, Thomas Pape

Current tools and innovations for bringing legacy information into the modern age

153    Unlocking Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits
    Suzanne C. Pilsk, Martin R. Kalfatovic, Joel M. Richard

173    Sherborn’s Index Animalium: New names, systematic errors and availability of names in the light of modern nomenclature
    Francisco Welter-Schultes, Angela Görlich, Alexandra Lutze

189    Digitising legacy zoological taxonomic literature: Processes, products and using the output
    Christopher H. C. Lyal

207    The use and limits of scientific names in biological informatics
    David Remsen

225    The List of Available Names (LAN): A new generation for stable taxonomic names in zoology?
    Miguel A. Alonso-Zarazaga, Daphne Gail Fautin, Ellinor Michel

The future of biological nomenclature

233    A common registration–to–publication automated pipeline for nomenclatural acts for higher plants (International Plant Names Index, IPNI), fungi (Index Fungorum, MycoBank) and animals (ZooBank)
    Lyubomir Penev, Alan Paton, Nicky Nicolson, Paul Kirk, Richard Pyle, Robert Whitton, Teodor Georgiev, Christine Barker, Christopher Hopkins, Ellinor Michel, Vincent Robert, Jordan Biserkov, Pavel Stoev

247    Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy
    Roderic D. M. Page

261    Towards a Global Names Architecture: The future of indexing scientific names
    Richard L. Pyle

Appendix

283    Manual for proposing a Part of the List of Available Names (LAN) in Zoology
    Miguel A. Alonso-Zarazaga, Philippe Bouchet, Richard L. Pyle, Nikita Kluge, Daphne Fautin

299    Index

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