Fauna Europaea; all European animal species on the web
Yde de Jong, Zoological Museum Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94766, NL-1090 GT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.For the first time in history all names of the European land and fresh water species are integrally available on the Web. This public service is presented as Fauna Europaea. Fauna Europaea covers about 130.000 species, which is much more than the originally projected number of 100.000 species when starting Fauna Europaea. This is a huge success for all the more than 400 contributing specialists throughout Europe , and an unparalleled effort in the world so far. A first release of the Fauna Europaea index via the web portal (for public access) has been presented at 27 th of September 2004.
Fauna Europaea was a European Commission (EU) funded project for a period of 4 1/2 years (starting March 2000) and provides a web based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level (up to Ural, excluding Caucasus region), and some additional optional information. Fauna Europaea is a unique (standard) reference for many users in science, government, industry, nature conservation, and education. Considering the current concepts established in the Zoological Code of nomenclature a new database structure has been designed. To ensure the collation of high quality data, more then 400 specialists, including 65 Group Coordinators, have been contracted. Advanced on-line and off-line tools for data import and data management were developed, and innovative procedures for data validating applied, including regional and thematic validation meetings, and advanced digital tools to check for technical and logical correctness. Expansion of the current geographic coverage of Fauna Europaea, to also include the non-European parts of Northern Asia, and the inclusion of additional data types (including vernacular names), is in preparation.
Fauna Europaea established a formal relationship with its sister projects Euro+Med PlantBase and the European Register of Marine Species (ERMS), which are developing comparable, services for terrestrial plant and marine species respectively. The advanced integration of the results (databases) of these projects is now being realized through a so-called Euro-Hub, which is an effort of the EU-funded Species-2000 Europe project.