Memorandum from the Species 2000 Catalogue
of Life Secretariat based in the University of Reading
Species 2000 Catalogue of Life is a recent development
that may not be well known to members of the HoL Science &
Technology Committee. It also raises some public service and resource
issues that may be of interest to the Committee.
In the evidence given below we use responses
to Questions 1 and 2 to introduce the programme, and Question
4 to lay out the resource issues that the programme raises in
relation to funding and sustainability.
| Acronyms used in this evidence
|
BBSRC | Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Swindon, UK
|
| CATE | Creating a Taxonomic E-science, NHM & RBG Kew, UK.
|
| CBD | UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Montreal, Canada.
|
| CBOL | Consortium for the Barcode of Life, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA.
|
| CODATA | The Committee on Data for Science & Technology, Paris, France.
|
| EC | European Commission, Brussels, Belgium.
|
| EoL | Encyclopedia of Life, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA..
|
| GBIF | Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Copenhagen, Denmark.
|
| GEF | Global Environment Facility, Washington DC, USA.
|
| ITIS | Integrated Taxonomic Information System,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA.
|
| IUBS | International Union of Biological Science, Paris, France.
|
| IUCN | The World Conservation Union, Gland, Switzerland.
|
| NERC | Natural Environment Research Council, Swindon, UK.
|
| NHM | Natural History Museum, London, UK.
|
| NIES | National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan.
|
| RBG Kew | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
|
| UN | United Nations, New York, USA.
|
| |
Question 1: Current research priorities, and barriers to
delivery.
A recent research development based in the UK and involving
all of the major systematic institutions, is the Species 2000
Catalogue of Life programme, with its Secretariat at the University
of Reading.
The electronic Catalogue of Life (www.catalogueoflife.org)
summarises the output from fundamental research, and synthesises
a simple usable standardised view of the taxonomy of all organisms.
The programme has developed more rapidly than could have been
predicted (it celebrated reaching one million species in its 2007
edition), and has been taken up as the primary taxonomic backbone
by large numbers of national, regional, and global organisations.
It provides the taxonomic backbone to the GBIF and EoL portals,
and is used as a taxonomic authority file by CBOL, GenBank, IUCN
and many national and regional biodiversity portals, as well as
receiving very substantial usage from individuals using the website
and electronic products.
Clearly the Catalogue of Life is not itself conducting primary
taxonomic research, but what it is researching is the platform
and product needed to deliver taxonomic knowledge to users in
the outside community, either through its own services, or as
an infrastructure to support other portal services such as GBIF.
It uses a distributed model illustrated in Figure 1. In particular:
(i)
it provides a coherent and authoritative platform through which
taxonomic results (from the UK and worldwide) can be delivered
to certain significant classes of users; and
(ii)
the process of locating quality taxonomic coverage for all groups
of organisms (plants, animals, fungi, and microbes including viruses)
is decidedly helpful to the research community in that it stimulates
the continuous enhancement of supplier taxon databases and it
highlights the very significant gaps and shortcomings.
Fig. 1 Catalogue of Life distributed model.
The Catalogue of Life functions as a distributed network
using peer review to select taxonomic sectors from the databases
of different organisations. A skilled team at Reading connects,
snips and pastes the components sectors in a complex operation
to synthesise both the species checklist and the taxonomic hierarchy.
The 2008 edition will be published in April, containing 1.1 million
species supplied by 52 taxonomic databases around the world. NHM,
RBG Kew, and CABI are among the largest partners and contributors
in the UK, but smaller UK components come from the N. Museum of
Wales, University of Reading, University of Oxford, private suppliers,
Zoological record (Thomson Zoological), and RBG Edinburgh may
join the programme shortly.
The significance of this programme may be judged from four
decisions of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at its
Conference of the Parties in Curitiba, Brazil in March 2006, given
below:
UN CONVENTION ON
BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY
CoP 8, Decision VIII/3
Global Taxonomy Initiative: in depth review of the implementation
of the programme of work for the Global Taxonomy Initiative.
The Conference of the Parties
2. Notes with appreciation the contributions to
the Global Taxonomy Initiative made by BioNET-INTERNATIONAL, the
Global Biodiversity Information Facility, CABI International,
the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) and Species
2000 and encourages these organisations and initiatives
to continue contributing to the implementation of the Convention.
6. Recalling target 1 of the Global Strategy for
Plant Conservation ("A widely accessible working list of
known plant species, as a step towards a complete world flora"),
welcomes the progress made by Species 2000, the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, and collaborating partners towards the achievement
of this target.
7. Adopts as a target under operational objective
3 of the programme of work for the Global Taxonomy Initiative
"A widely accessible checklist of known species, as a step
towards a global register of plants, animals, microorganisms and
other organisms", bearing in mind the urgent need for timely
provision of scientific names of organisms to support implementation
of work under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Requests the Executive Secretary to:
11.c. Continue collaborating with existing initiatives,
including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the Integrated
Taxonomic Information System and Species 2000, to develop the
Electronic Catalogue of Names of Known Organisms and the Catalogue
of Life.
Significant barriers to delivering the Catalogue of Life
priorities are these:
(i)
Major gaps in taxon database coverage, in many cases caused by
true gaps in taxonomic knowledge.
The portion of the curve marked "D" in Figure 2
represents the fraction of the world's known species presently
not available to the Catalogue of Life, either because patchy
knowledge has not been assembled into a coherent taxonomic treatment,
or because of true gaps in knowledge.
Fig. 2 Growth of coverage: A,B & C- to the present (B—increase
with EC grant); D & E—projected (D with new tools, E
without).
(ii)
Resource limitations. Species 2000 and its US partner ITIS have
demonstrated not only "proof of concept", but also that
half of the task has been delivered in six years. However the
operation is now resource-limited, despite calls by GBIF and the
CBD to accelerate, for instance for possible "functional
completion" by 2012.
A significant start to the project came from the SPICE and
LITCHI projects funded by BBSRC in the 1990's, but since then
the principal resources for this programme have come largely from
international sources—the EC, Japanese Government, GBIF,
EoL, IUBS, CBOL and CODATA, although there is again discussion
with BBSRC on UK funding. Of course, the UK taxonomic institutions
make significant resource contributions to the programme by providing
direct access to their taxon databases.
Question 2: the Role of Taxonomy
Since the last HoL review, there has been a marked change
in appreciation of the role taxonomy plays in many if not all
biodiversity actions. Taxonomy is now valued as the key infrastructure
for two reasons.
(i)
It permits the globalisation of biodiversity actions such as monitoring,
regulation, biosecurity and modelling.
(ii)
It provides the indexing management for biodiversity on the Internet.
(The analogy is that taxonomy used to provide the "phone-book",
but now it provides the "telephone exchange"—enabling
access to the right data at the right time, all over the world.)
This central role for taxonomy is acknowledged in the BBSRC
document "The Role of BBSRC in Biodiversity Research"
(see p.7 "development of an electronic catalogue of species
names, as the means by which all biological data can be related
within a coherent framework")
The Species 2000 Catalogue of Life provides the necessary
standardisation for international and interdisciplinary communication.
As examples that impact on conservation and global change:
(i)
A precise Amphibia taxonomy has enabled the global conservation
assessments of Amphibians, to be made comparable around the world.
From the assembled data it has then been possible to provide precise
quantification of the declines of certain species around the world.
(ii)
An electronic synonymic catalogue of organisms (such as the Catalogue
of Life), enables the selection of specimen data points from around
the world (such as via GBIF) for use in bioclimatic envelope modelling.
These models can then contribute to predicting species movements
under climate change scenarios, and form the basis of many biodiversity
prediction systems. The use of an electronic synonymic catalogue
such as the Catalogue of Life, or the copy in the GBIF portal,
permits synonymic amplification of the search (ie to search under
synonyms as well as accepted names) so that specimens of each
species can be located even in countries and in datasets where
these species are listed under different scientific names. Given
that many modellers are concerned with not single species, but
large sets of species, the ability to automatically use synonymic
amplification in the process of locating suitable data points
adds significantly to the success of such searches, and the analysis
of data assembled.
Question 4: the Level of Funding
The plan to extend the Catalogue of Life to all known species
on Earth (referred to as "functional completion") and
to make the continuous development a sustainable community-wide
process involves four layers of resources:
(i)
The ongoing taxonomic enhancement of existing taxon databases
based in the UK. The cost is of the order of magnitude 500,000
spp. X £2 per year = £5 million over 5 years. There
are presently 10 participating databases in the UK (largely at
NHM, RBG Kew and CABI) supplying approximately 450,000 species.
The number of databases and the number of species is likely to
rise over the period. If it was to double—then £2 million
p.a.
There is a similar order of magnitude of cost to the 20 other
countries supplying the remaining 42 presently participating databases—and
again if the Catalogue is to approach completion, the scale of
species to be supplied may double.
(ii)
The central processing facility, secretariat, and global community
programme of Species 2000 has to be maintained, including a new
generation of computing tools that will allow further automation
of the production process over the coming 5 year period and including
the ongoing development of the global programme. This is estimated
at £700,000 p.a. or £3.5 million over 5 years.
(iii)
Species 2000 and the national institutions are in discussion with
BBSRC over a substantial research proposal to test new informatics
techniques for creating proto-GSD databases for the missing groups,
and to use these to close the gaps. This proposal also proposes
the enlargement of the secretariat with Taxon Teams at the national
institutions to target how to complete each of the major groups.
(iv)
If the proto-GSD and gap-filling exercise leads to the establishment
of further taxon databases supplying Species 2000 in the UK, then
there will be associated costs during its set-up period (that
is before the steady state of ongoing taxonomic enhancement sets
in) in the order of magnitude of £500,000 over 5 years for
each.
Finally, it is tempting to suggest that these costs can be
borne internationally or through the UN or GEF. This programme
already has very substantial support in many nations around the
world, but it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to
gain UN/GEF support as a UK-based programme. This is why we raise
the issue as a key component arising out of the international
role of the taxonomic community in the UK.
Question 5: International Collaboration
In our own area of activity (Catalogue of Life taxon databases)
there is already very extensive international collaboration and
international funding. In general the international funding has
been more extensive than that in the UK.
(i)
Species 2000 has Directors from the UK and 4 countries (Australia,
Brazil, Canada, The Netherlands), its Team from the UK and 11
countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, USA, The Netherlands, France,
India, Belgium, New Zealand, China and Japan), and it's supplier
databases from the UK and 16 countries (Ireland, Austria, USA,
Japan, The Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, Australia, Russia,
Spain, Israel, Belgium, Taiwan, Poland and the Philippines).
(ii)
Species 2000 has received its largest financial contributions
from the EC, and from GBIF, as well as smaller amounts from IUBS,
CODATA, EOL, ITIS, NIES and CBOL—all international organisations,
some receiving contributions from the UK.
(iii)
Significant sums have been committed to further components of
the Catalogue of Life programme in the USA (via ITIS), in China,
in Japan, and in New Zealand.
Question 9: Web-based Taxonomy
The phrase "web-based taxonomy" is used in two
senses—to mean taxonomic revision process done with web-tools
(something that is only just starting, as in the NERC CATE project)
and to mean the presentation of completed taxonomy on the web
(that is now well established).
Species 2000 Catalogue of Life is a leader in the latter
process—focusing especially on taxonomic indexing, an important
component for data-sharing institutions such as GBIF, SpeciesBase
and EoL. However we also anticipate that revisions generated on
the web by the former process may also contribute to the Catalogue
of Life.
4 February 2008
|
