Papers & Posters

Abstract

Overview of nomenclatural practices in Zoology and Botany with respect to the consequences of integrating zoological and botanical checklists data into a single virtual environment
Yde de Jong¹, Melina Verbeek¹, Verner Michelsen², Fedor Steeman², Nicolas Bailly³, Claire Basire³. ¹Zoological Museum Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94766, NL-1090 GT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ²Zoological Museum, Department of Entomology, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark. ³Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), Institut de Systématique (CNRS FR 1541), Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, 43 rue Cuvier, 75231 Paris cedex 05, France

Within the context of the EU project EuroCat, on the integration of the three main European taxonomic indices on animal, plants and marine species (Fauna Europaea, Euro+Med PlanstBase and ERMS respectively) to provide combined access into a single so called 'EuroHub', it was recognized that different nomenclatural concepts are applied in all three databases. As the underlying SPICE technical infrastructure was initially developed from a botanical perspective, the applicability on the zoological situation, especially its uninominal synonymy, is problematic. The main issue is that nomenclatural history, as kept within botanical nomenclature through binominal synonymy, including authorship citing and gender shifts, is considered insignificant according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). As a consequence past nomenclatural 'acts' are not preserved and no exact transition of accepted and synonym names into a single historically appropriate (full) binominal index is possible. In addition complication occur with merging heterogonous data sets into a single data presentation and when cross-mapping data sets (e.g. using LITCHI).