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with more frequent updates[11][12]. At the highest level, various organisations aggregate lists across multiple groups. Such multigroup lists are relatively common at the national and infranational level, at least for plants and vertebrates, particularly where listing has legal standing.
Two decades ago, the late Frank Bisby championed a single authoritative list of all species on Earth[13][14]. A partnership between the International Council for Science (ICSU: Committee on Data for Science and Technology), the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), and the International Union of Microbiological Societies in the early 1990s resulted in the launch of the Catalogue of Life (CoL), hosted by Species 2000. The CoL is currently fairly complete for major taxonomic groups, with gaps being narrowed rapidly through greater participation by the taxonomic community. It brings together 173 individual global lists, referred to as Global Species Databases (GSDs), covering much biodiversity[15]. Numerous organisations use the CoL as their taxonomic backbone to resolve the correct spellings, classification and synonymies of species names, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL), as well as international biodiversity policy initiatives such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Environment Program, and the European Environment Agency. The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) provides numerous global species lists to the CoL and independently provides species name resolution services to GBIF, EoL, and the Ocean Biogeographic Information System[11][12]. Thus, whilst there is already a high degree of collaboration among aggregators, with much sharing of lists (Fig 1), all the aggregators remain distinct entities. This results in differences among the lists they propagate, not least because they are updated at different rates. Added to this are the complications that arise when taxonomic groups have multiple authoritative lists. As an example, there are currently at least 4 global lists of birds, each differing in
Fig 1. Process by which taxonomic information is currently assembled into global lists. At just about every stage, the taxonomic decisions of individual taxonomists can influence lists directly, as well as through the various levels of aggregation.
https://doi.org/10/1371/journal.pbio.3000736.g001
PLOS Biology | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000736 July 7, 2020
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