Vasily Radashevsky wrote: Does anyone of annelidians participate in the
project? Do we have a chance to get an up-to-date list of our beloved beasts
in 2000?
Species 2000 basically is a consortium global species databases (GDSs)
of certain taxa. It plans to make available a 'Common Access System' to
these databases. At present there is only a proof-of-concept search engine
available on its web site (www.sp2000.org), where you can also find other
details.
The Unesco-IOC Register of Marine Organisms (URMO), which I am
editing, is one of the members of Species 2000. This register is under
construction and until now only a small portion of it is available on a web
site. I hope this is going to change soon, when a new data base system will
be available. However, I regret that "our beloved beasts" are still not well
represented. Certain small groups are there already, e.g. sipunculids,
echiurids, priapulids. The marine hirudineans are also managable, but it will
be a major effort to make an up-to-date list of polychaetes. Some families
will be easy and several colleagues gave contributions but there are no
experts for most families. I think we will not get much further than a highly
preliminary checklist.
Obviously only part of the URMO databases can be used as GDS for
Species 2000. Several groups such as vertebrates, oligochaetes and
hirudineans are largely terrestrial or limnic and consequently not complete
in URMO. In some cases such as cnidarians and gastrotrichs I did include
the limnic species so they can be used as Species 2000 GDS.
For several groups URMO is also being used for the European list Gerard
Bellan was refering to, which is particularly easy in those cases where
geographical details are available. Anyway, we try to avoid duplication of
efforts whenever we can.
Dr Jacob van der Land
National Museum of Natural History - Naturalis
P.O.Box 9517
2300 RA Leiden
the Netherlands
tel. +31 - 71 - 5687654
fax +31 - 71 - 5687666
e-mail: land at naturalis.nnm.nl
editor of Unesco-IOC Register of Marine Organisms:
http://www2.eti.uva.nl/Database/urmo/default.html
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