Species 2000 Secretariat, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AS, UK
Planning is going ahead now for Phase 2 of the Catalogue of Life programme.
It seems unlikely that the present technique of linking existing Global Species Databases (GSDs) together to constitute the Global Hub can be continued much beyond 800,000 to 900,000 species, especially if the complete task is to be finished on time for 2011.
Three approaches are being developed. The first is to aggregate taxonomic databases on the regional scale, along the lines of the present experimental Euro Hub in the Species 2000 europa project. If regional hubs could be established, or links made with existing regional hubs of other programmes, then very many of the species not presently available in Global Species Databases, may nonetheless be located and viewed from regional species databases. However, because of differing taxonomic concepts, records taken from these databases are likely to have a lower taxonomic integrity with records form other hubs. But if a number of regional hubs could be linked, for instance for Russia, China, N. America, New Zealand and Australia, then this would make available substantial numbers of the missing species.
A second approach is to further overlay this architecture of multiple regional hubs with semi-automated techniques for synthesizing virtual global species databases.
A third technique is to use new ‘taxonomically intelligent’ software to create global species databases from starter kits from the nomenclator databases, and by comparison with the virtual GSDs created by harvesting regional hubs.