[Taxacom] Taxonomy - crisis, what crisis?

[Neal Evenhuis]

I think their analysis missed a very important point.

They say that given the decline in numbers of species described per taxonomist since 1950 there must be a declining pool of species. This does not take into account that some taxonomists are simply not publishing new taxa anymore -- for various reasons (greater admin time, teaching duties, grant writing for them and students, studies focusing more on evolutionary relationships, etc.).

I would contend that we have plenty of taxonomists but the current financial climate and funding priorities overall do not support describing new taxa anymore. Maybe someone should do an analysis on whether there is a positive, negative, or any correlation to the apparent increasing amount of molecular research by "taxonomists" (since that 1950 benchmark used by Joppa et al.) and the decreasing numbers of new species per taxonomist they claim exists.

Just a thought ....

-Neal

On 10/5/11 6:37 AM, "Roderic Page" <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk<mailto:r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>> scribbled the following tidbit:

Hot on the tail of the recent paper son the number of species comes Joppa et al.'s paper in TREE http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.010 , which concludes:

"Conventional wisdom is highly prejudiced. It suggests that taxonomists were a formerly more numerous people, are in 'crisis', are becoming endangered and are generally asocial. We consider these hypotheses and reject them to varying degrees."

It's an interesting paper. I've written a short blog post on the irony that it will be hard to test their conclusions because the taxonomic data they use isn't freely available, see http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/10/taxonomy-crisis-what-crisis.html

Regards

Rod

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
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Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk<mailto:r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
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