Page:Principles for creating a single authoritative list of the world’s species.pdf/1



 OPEN ACCESS

Citation: Garnett ST, Christidis L, Conix S, Costello MJ, Zachos FE, Bánki OS, et al. (2020) Principles for creating a single authoritative list of the world's species. PLoS Biol 18(7): e3000736. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000736

Published: July 7, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Garnett et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: Authors SG, LC, SC, MC, KT, FZ received funding from the International Union for Biological Sciences (http://www.iubs.org) to run a workshop reviewing the principles described in the paper as part of the IUBS programme "Governance of Global Taxonomic Lists." SC's involvement was funded by the Flemish Research Council Grant 3H200026. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. All other authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist

Abbreviations: CBD, Convention on Biological Diversity; CDU, Charles Darwin University; CITES, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora; CMS, Convention on Migratory Species; CoL, Catalogue of Life; EoL, Encyclopedia of Life; GBIF, Global Biodiversity Information Facility; GSD, Global Species Database; ICSU, International Council for Science; IPBES, Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services; ISC, International Science Council; IUBS, International Union of Biological Sciences; IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature; WoRMS, World Register of Marine Species. 

PERSPECTIVE

Stephen T. Garnett, Les Christidis, Stijn Conix, Mark J. Costello, Frank E. Zachos, Olaf S. Bánki, Yiming Bao, Saroj K. Barik, John S. Buckeridge, Donald Hobern, Aaron Lien, Narelle Montgomery, Svetlana Nikolaeva, Richard L. Pyle, Scott A. Thomson, Peter Paul van Dijk, Anthony Whalen, Zhi-Qiang Zhang, Kevin R. Thiele

Lists of species underpin many fields of human endeavour, but there are currently no universally accepted principles for deciding which biological species should be accepted when there are alternative taxonomic treatments (and, by extension, which scientific names should be applied to those species). As improvements in information technology make it easier to communicate, access, and aggregate biodiversity information, there is a need for a framework that helps taxonomists and the users of taxonomy decide which taxa and names should be used by society whilst continuing to encourage taxonomic research that leads to new species discoveries, new knowledge of species relationships, and the refinement of existing species concepts. Here, we present 10 principles that can underpin such a governance framework, namely (i) the species list must be based on science and free from nontaxonomic considerations and interference, (ii) governance of the species list must aim for community support and use, (iii) all decisions about list composition must be transparent, (iv) the governance of validated lists of species is separate from the governance of the names of taxa, (v) governance of lists of accepted species must not constrain academic freedom, (vi) the set of criteria considered sufficient to recognise species boundaries may appropriately vary between different taxonomic groups but should be consistent when