Hi All,
Mark Costello and the previous WoRMS Steering Committee including Kristian have just had published a nice paper (open access) all about the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), and the background to it. You will get a better idea of the complexity of it, how it works, and how it evolved. WoRMS really is an impressive achievement, thanks to many volunteer contributors, including those involved with the earlier ERMS initiative. It has a skilled group of support people at VLIZ in Ostend, and there are plans to make it better. A lot of the drive and facilitation for the growth and promotion of it has come from the work of Mark Costello as a leader, and he is to be congratulated. He has been associated with the project and its precursors for 16 years or so.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0051629
Costello, Mark J.; Bouchet, Philippe; Boxshall, Geoff; Fauchald, Kristian; Gordon, Dennis; Hoeksema, Bert W.; Poore, Gary C. B.; van Soest, Rob W. M.; Stöhr, Sabine; Walter, T. Chad; Vanhoorne, Bart; Decock, Wim; Appeltans, Ward. 2013. Global Coordination and Standardisation in Marine Biodiversity through the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and Related Databases. PLoS ONE 8(1): e51629
If you use WoRMS for Polychaeta I recommend you work via the WpolyDb interface. It is not just a cosmetic overlay, but shows you more. http://www.marinespecies.org/polychaeta/index.php
If you are using WoRMS as part of a review of a family or genus, and are going to cite it I recommend you get in touch with me. Given a bit of lead time I can arrange a tidy up of particular sections that may have fallen out of date.
Best,
Geoff
--
Geoffrey.Read from niwa.co.nz
Lead Editor WoRMS Polychaeta (WPolyDb)
http://twitter.com/WPolyDb
--
Please consider the environment before printing this email.
NIWA is the trading name of the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research Ltd.
