[Taxacom] Costello-gate

[Stephen Thorpe]

just one final comment on this:
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[quote from abstract of Costello et al.]We found that trends in the rate of description of 580,000 marine and terrestrial species, in the taxonomically authoritative World Register of Marine Species and Catalogue of Life databases, were similar until the 1950?s. [unquote]
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this may be the source of the problem with what he has done. His WoRMS database is pretty good (though far from perfect) for known marine species. But most of the debate on biodiversity is centred on tropical rainforests. Catalogue of Life harvests most of its marine data from WoRMS. It seems possible that Costello thinks that?CoL is equally good and comprehensive for terrestrial species, but it is not - far from it! It has least data for the groups (beetles, wasps, mites, nematodes) that are the most crucial in this context. For example, the most species in any genus actually goes to the jewel beetle genus Agrilus (see http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Agrilus), with 2886 currently recognised species, of which CoL (http://www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2011/browse/tree/id/2423797) lists only 1 species!! Whether or not CoL is still the "best available" database is debatable, but is not relevant, because it simply doesn't have the data required
 to make a sensible biodiversity estimate for crucial terrestrial ecosystems ...
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Stephen