Species 2000 and China: completing the Catalogue of Life

Chair: JI Li-Qiang

A fundamental impediment to comparing scientific data about organisms around the world has been the lack of a comprehensive catalogue of species. Although it is thought that about 1.75 million species of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms have been described, there is no unified or global compilation, even of these organisms that are already known. Such a unified catalogue is now much needed by global programmes such as the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the GBIF, conservation organisations such as IUCN, bar-coding initiatives such as CBOL, and by GenBank and other molecular systems.

At the CODATA Conference in Chambery , France in 1994, a proposal was made to establish an Internet project that would create a virtual catalogue. This would be created by federating the existing sectors of taxonomic catalogue from an array of differing databases around the world. This project, now known as the Species 2000 Programme, has drawn in partners, databases, software and other projects from all corners of the globe to develop a major world-wide programme, and, along with a N. American project ITIS, to create a unique resource, the Catalogue of Life. In March of 2006 it was announced that the Catalogue of Life had reached a very significant target, 880,000 species, that is half of all known organisms on earth.

Completing the second half of the Catalogue of Life will be considerably more complex than the first half, and has to be undertaken as a series of partnerships with the ‘megadiverse’ countries, such as China, Brazil and South Africa in which there are large reservoirs of species that are known, but not yet in the Catalogue, as well as significant needs to utilise the Catalogue itself.

The proposed Symposium Session will be the launch of a new Chinese Node in the global programme, in which an array of taxonomic databases will be developed, federated in an Internet ‘Chinese Node’, and interlinked with the Global and Regional Nodes in the Catalogue of Life global network.