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[Taxacom] How far are we to completing a world genus/specieslisting for animals

Tony.Rees at csiro.au Tony.Rees at csiro.au
Mon Aug 2 23:58:08 CDT 2010 

Dear Joel, all,

Here is some of the logic I used to produce some "guesstimates" in answer to a question of this type as posted on http://www.obis.org.au/irmng/irmng_faq/, in the section "How complete is IRMNG at this time?"

Chapman, 2009 "Numbers if Living Species in Australia and the World", 2nd edition gives a total estimate of 1,899,587 "world described/accepted" living species (p.11), of which 1,424,153 are multicellular animals - let's say 1.9m and 1.42m, respectively. Note that he does not claim to have or have seen all these names, they are composites of published totals from many sources with a degree of scrutiny and selectivity.

I believe there may be around 300k "good" named fossil species of both plants and animals, also protists and bacteria in some cases, giving a total of perhaps 2.2m accepted species, living and fossil, across all kingdoms/domains.

Using a very rough guesstimate that there may be on average around 2 synonyms for every accepted taxon at species level, that would suggest that there may be in the order of 6.6-7m published names of which around 30-35% may be valid, not including spelling errors, authority variants, and so on.

The current Catalogue of Life (2010) contains 1,257,735 notionally valid species together with an unstated number of synonyms, but I believe the latter is around 500,000. This would suggest that at species level, the CoL is approx. 66% complete for valid, extant taxa but only perhaps 38% complete for all published names, valid and non-valid, extant and fossil, animals and other kingdoms/domains; and by definition, fossil names are not in scope for CoL at this time, although at least some of the latter can be found in PaleoDB (www.paleodb.org/), which currently advertises that it holds 169,874 taxon names for fossils at all ranks, including both valid and non-valid names, so possible 20-25% of the "missing" fossil species names can be found there (Of course I am happy to be corrected here if someone has better estimates).

uBio (www.ubio.org ) currently advertises as listing 11,106,374 names at all ranks (also including vernacular names) but a number of these will be variants of each other i.e. misspellings and variant cited authorities. The true number of names included after the above variation is accounted for may be closer to 4-5 million. Also uBio has a lot of infraspecies names which will inflate their total too as compared with numbers of species alone. So maybe there are 2-3 million actual species names represented by the range of variants in the uBio holdings. Obviously this is greater than the holdings of Cat. of Life but in the main these names have not received the same degree of expert scrutiny and also are not arranged in any single, immediately useable taxonomic hierarchy.

The Global Names Index, GNI is basically a superset of uBio NameBank plus a number of other sources and so is subject to similar considerations at this time; quote from their site http://www.globalnames.org/ : "At this time GNI is aware of 20 million namestrings for groups of organisms, most of which are minor spelling variants of other names."

At genus level my estimates are based on slightly different criteria, i.e. the degree of completeness and overlap between various sources I am familiar with including Nomenclator Zoologicus, Index Nominum Genericorum, List of Names with Standing in Prokaryotic Nomenclature and more. From these considerations my best guess is currently that there are 470,000 published genus names for all groups, living and fossil of which perhaps 200,000 are valid. In my IRMNG genus level compilation I currently hold around 446,000 genus names (with an emphasis on correct spellings) so this may be perhaps 95% complete at this time (or of course a bit more or less) across all groups. I could subset this further by group with a little effort if you wish. Of course all the IRMNG genus names are not attributed exactly to family as yet (many are just to phylum or class as per Nomenclator Zoologicus in the first instance) and only a subset have been checked for valid/synonym status, but it is a start.

I'd be interested to see how much of the above fits with others' perceptions in this area.

Regards

Tony Rees
Manager, Divisional Data Centre,
CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research,
GPO Box 1538,
Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
Ph: 0362 325318 (Int: +61 362 325318)
Fax: 0362 325000 (Int: +61 362 325000)
Google Maps: http://maps.google.com.au/?ie=UTF8&ll=-42.88725,147.33777&z=18
e-mail: Tony.Rees at csiro.au
Manager, OBIS Australia regional node, http://www.obis.org.au/
Biodiversity informatics research activities: http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/biodiversity.htm
Personal info: http://www.fishbase.org/collaborators/collaboratorsummary.cfm?id=1566
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-
> bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Robin Leech
> Sent: Tuesday, 3 August 2010 2:14 PM
> To: Stephen Thorpe; Joel Hallan; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] How far are we to completing a world
> genus/specieslisting for animals
> 
> Well, it all depends on a few things.  If you believe that there are only
> about
> 4 million species, we are getting closer.  If you believe that there are
> anywhere
> from 30 million to over 100 million, then we have a long way to go to
> complete
> the world listing of genus/species.
> 
> Another point to keep in mind is that there have been extinctions at the
> 95%
> or
> greater something like 5 times. So, if we have ONLY 30 million today, and
> this total is what has mushroomed from the 5% remainder, and this has
> happened 5 times, and figuring that previous species levels were at the 30
> million level, then it looks like all the fossils will contribute - if we
> can ever find
> them - 120 million, and that the extant will contribute 30 million for a
> total of
> 150 million.
> 
> And, we have been creating our own fossils.  All those species we
> collected
> when
> they were extant, and which we and other processes killed off are now
> extinct,
> are fossils, no?
> 
> So, we have a long, long way to go.
> 
> Robin
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Stephen Thorpe" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
> To: "Joel Hallan" <joelhallan at hotmail.com>; <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
> Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 9:58 PM
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] How far are we to completing a world
> genus/specieslisting for animals
> 
> 
> >How far are we to completing a world genus/species listing for animals?
> 
> 
> An interesting question out of the blue!
> 
> Well, it can only ever be made up-to-date, of course, never "complete"
> 
> With so many more or less independent initiatives all working in parallel,
> I
> wonder who you mean by "we"?
> 
> I can only speak for Wikispecies, and even then I can only say that
> progress
> is
> rapid, but I have no exact idea how far we are from up-to-date ...
> 
> why do you ask?
> 
> Stephen
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Joel Hallan <joelhallan at hotmail.com>
> To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Sent: Tue, 3 August, 2010 3:47:38 PM
> Subject: [Taxacom] How far are we to completing a world genus/species
> listing
> for animals
> 
> 
> How far are we to completing a world genus/species listing for animals?
> 
> Joel Hallan
> Austin, Texas
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