Taxacom: Single official lists of taxa (sensu Doug Yanega many proposals to this list)

[Jose Fernandez-Triana]

Hello everyone,

[Sorry for the long email that follows]



What a long exchange of ideas over the past couple of weeks or so! Even
though at times it may look repetitive or tiring, I think this exchange has
been mostly valuable, as it is indeed important to hear other criteria and
see other perspectives (we have seen comments coming from different sectors
and degrees of specialization). I think these exchanges are one of the main
useful things of Taxacom.



One of the main components of this discussion has been the proposal of
having “master lists” of taxa. I copy below my signature the latest email
from Doug about that -but, to be fair, he has been proposing that approach
for a long time (at least 2019 as far as I can remember, probably longer
than that). And he has mentioned that several times in this Taxacom list. I
have to say that I fully agree with Doug’s proposal, and have at times
wondered why there is not more support for that idea here. Instead, the
discussion usually steers away towards other topics and his proposal gets
once and again “forgotten” among the plethora of emails and discussions
going into many tangents…



I truly believe that such list (or lists) are indeed possible and would
probably be the best way to deal with the many problems that we have been
discussing here lately. What I think has been overlooked, or at least not
discussed with more detail is how to generate such lists. Usually what I
see here is the work from informatics or databasing experts, trying to
obtain and curate such information from many sources, and I also see the
efforts (wonderful! Do not get me wrong) of isolated persons spending a
considerable amount of their time (mostly for free and out of love for what
they do) gathering such data and preparing such lists on their own.



But there has never been a concerted effort (at least that I am aware of,
but perhaps I am wrong!) to discuss how such list(s) could be generated
from bottom to top, so to speak, i.e., generated by the community instead
of done by the few brave “IT knights” that are trying to do it now. Why do
not we try to engage the wider taxonomic community to work together on
that? And “reward” them by way of publications where such lists are
initially presented, so that everyone that participates “gains” something
(instead of just appearing to be just contributing her/his info “for free”
to some IT wizard that would generate the list, as it is usually the case)?



There are no real limitations to such an approach, if there would be a will
to do it. For example, scientific societies devoted to specific taxa could
decide to support more and advance such efforts. [I am going to use
Hymenoptera here to use myself as a Guinea pig in the following exercise (I
am the current president of the Hym. Society)]. So, let’s say that the
International Society of Hymenopterists (ISH) decides to publish lists of
genera (and species, because a concerted effort needs not to be limited
only to genera gender agreement, it can also be broadened to include many
other things such as synonyms, species lists, etc.). Like all of the hyper
diverse insect orders, we do not really know how many species are already
described (let alone how many undescribed… but that is another topic, so I
digress there). And we do not have lists of synonyms, gender of genera, and
so on and so forth for many Hymenoptera groups. But what if ISH members
decide to work together towards that goal? The work can be spread by
families, or any other, smaller grouping, such that work can be manageable
and papers can be produced as groups are completed. Such publications can
later be used by all of the databasers and IT wizards, but the initial list
gets credited to the taxonomists that worked preparing, checking and
analyzing those lists. One only needs to identify potential “project leads”
for specific taxa (be it family X or even a large genus Y) and have as many
people interested with that taxa getting involved in the work needed to
prepare such lists (authorship of the papers would be determined by the
individual contribution of each author). Taxa that are “orphan” (i.e., have
no current  experts to work on that, or the current experts are not
interested, would remain undone, until the time comes when someone would be
willing to work on that. But at least a good amount of taxa could be done
in the meantime. [One different problem is groups where there are different
experts with competing views and, unfortunately, sometimes contradictory or
strongly in disagreement… But, from what I have seen, that tends to be more
common in vertebrates than in larger groups such as invertebrates (although
no group is exempt from human disagreements and miseries, of course! In any
case, I will not touch in this email about how to solve those potentially
“difficult groups” to deal with when there are competing or opposed experts
(this could be discussed in a different email, if there is any interest in
doing that)].



A few years ago I worked on a project like that, with a single subfamily of
Braconidae (around 3,000 described species). The work involved a) one
undergrad student, b) one technician, c) one Ichneumonidae researcher, d)
two Braconidae researchers, with the main expertise on that taxon. At the
end everyone got “rewarded” (perhaps the better phrase would be “her/his
work towards that list was properly recognized”) and the paper, published
in 2020 and over 1,000 pages long, has become the standard for names and
other things related to that subfamily (including the first time the gender
for all genera of that group where clearly and explicitly stated, and over
300 new combinations were provided, etc.; see the link here:
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzookeys.pensoft.net%2Farticle%2F39128%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C038139efb97341fcc6f008db7c9e7b0e%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638240792601383750%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=CF%2BFINJFIUI8zVH4MBYqFO8c0Hn1X0q5lbdxsfU67Uo%3D&reserved=0). [For what is worth, Doug
helped me A LOT to correct many of the gender problems we encountered
during that work, that is why I know he has been pushing for these efforts
for a long time].



There is no limitation to continue doing that for other Hymenoptera taxa
that are still pending or any other group. And, needless to say, many other
lists have been generated, both before and after my example, and many of
them are better than mine! Thus, I do not pretend to have invented the
wheel here, I only point to an example of collaborative work done bottom to
top and being able to deliver a list that was then usable for the wider
community - as it has been discussed here for the past few weeks.



Perhaps we could think about this approach, because then things would be
more manageable and both the taxonomic and wider scientific community would
accomplish more. We could indeed have our cake and eat it, as long as we
could agree on some minimum standards and organization of the work to be
done…



And I will stop here, thanks to anyone that was patient enough to read up
to this point!

Cheers,

Jose


--
José L. Fernández-Triana, Ph.D.
Research Scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Canadian National Collection of Insects (CNC)
960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0C6, CANADA
Phone: 613-759-1034. Email: jose.fernandez at agr.gc.ca
Alternative email: cnc.braconidae at gmail.com