Suchergebnisse

Sir— Switzerland covers 0.03% of the world's land surface, and lacks marine or tropical ecosystems. Yet we have found an estimated 345,000 type specimens (used for taxonomic naming of species) in Swiss museums and other collections. According to some estimates, there are about 1.5 million known species in the world. If correct, this means that Switzerland contains type specimens of up to a quarter of all the world's known species. This exceptional number is surprising, as Switzerland has never been a colonial power, nor does it contain many large natural-history collections like those kept in prestigious institutions elsewhere. The work was done by taxonomists who built up enormous global collections — for example, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle and his son Alphonse in the nineteenth century, and Auguste Forel, who died in 1931 — and by others who focused on the biological survey of particular areas, such as New Caledonia or Paraguay. Establishing the exact number of types in Swiss collections is part of an initiative by the Swiss Biodiversity Collections Online Consortium (www.biodiversity.ch/sbc-online.ch) — a consortium of Swiss systematists, curators of biological collections, the Systematics Task Force and the Swiss Biodiversity Forum. The consortium is lobbying the Swiss federal government to invest in this unique resource so it can be made available to the scientific community, with access to visual sources and databases, through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and other Internet applications. The type collections are invaluable tools for use in international efforts to document our planet's biodiversity. Not only should they stimulate taxonomists to work on them, but they should surely be important enough for Switzerland to become a full member of GBIF so it can share its wealth with other scientists and conservationists. This activity may revitalize Swiss national systematics research, which has suffered several recent setbacks. Currently, there are no professors of systematic zoology ...

Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names (including synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level (up to the Urals, excluding the Caucasus region), and some additional information. The Fauna Europaea project covers about 230,000 taxonomic names, including 130,000 accepted species and 14,000 accepted subspecies, which is much more than the originally projected number of 100,000 species. This represents a huge effort by more than 400 contributing specialists throughout Europe and is a unique (standard) reference suitable for many users in science, government, industry, nature conservation and education. Coleoptera represent a huge assemblage of holometabolous insects, including as a whole more than 200 recognized families and some 400,000 described species worldwide. Basic information is summarized on their biology, ecology, economic relevance, and estimated number of undescribed species worldwide. Little less than 30,000 species are listed from Europe. The Coleoptera 2 section of the Fauna Europaea database (Archostemata, Myxophaga, Adephaga and Polyphaga excl. the series Elateriformia, Scarabaeiformia, Staphyliniformia and the superfamily Curculionoidea) encompasses 80 families (according to the previously accepted family-level systematic framework) and approximately 13,000 species. Tabulations included a complete list of the families dealt with, the number of species in each, the names of all involved specialists, and, when possible, an estimate of the gaps in terms of total number of species at an European level. A list of some recent useful references is appended. Most families included in the Coleoptera 2 Section have been updated in the most recent release of the Fauna Europaea index, or are ready to be updated as soon as the FaEu data management environment completes its migration from Zoological Museum Amsterdam to Berlin Museum für Naturkunde.