Donald Hobern drew my attention to nice the way iNaturalist displays taxonomic splits: In this example, observations identified as Rhipidura fuliginosa are being split into Rhipidura fuliginosa and Rhipidura albiscapa . This immediately reminds me of the idea which keeps circulating around, namely using version control tools to manage taxonomic classification.

Yet another taxonomic database, this time I can't blame anyone else because I'm the one building it (with some help, as I'll explain below).BioNames was my entry in EOL's Computable Data Challenge (you can see the proposal here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.92091). In that proposal I outlined my goal:The bulk of the funding from EOL is going into interface work by Ryan Schenk (@ryanschenk), author of synynyms among other cool things.

As part of the discussion on whether legacy biodiversity literature matters a graph from the following paper came up:So, why is the Sarkar et al. graph bogus? Here is their graph (Fig. 3) for animals:This is the number of new animal species described each year, estimated by parsing taxonomic names and extracting the date in the taxonomic authority. There are two prominent "spikes" which are worrying.

Benoît Fontaine et al. recently published a study concluding that average lag time between a species being discovered and subsequently described is 21 years.The paper concludes:This is a conclusion that merits more investigation, especially as the title of the paper suggests there is an appalling lack of efficiency (or resources) in the way we decsribe biodiversity.

Prompted by a conversation with Vince Smith at the recent Online Taxonomy meeting at the Linnean Society in London I've been revisiting touch-based displays of large trees. There are a couple of really impressive examples of what can be done. Perceptive Pixel I've blogged about this before, but came across another video that better captures the excitement of touch-based navigation of a taxonomy.

Playing with some sequence data I found numerous Plasmodium sequences from the following paper:These sequences (e.g., U43145) give the host as Thamnomys rutilans . You'd think it would be fairly easy to learn more about this animal, given that it hosts a relative of the cause of malaria in humans, and indeed there are a number of biomedical papers that come up in Google, e.g.:Google also tells me that Thamnomys rutilans is an

In the spirit of the Would you give me a grant experiment? [1] here's the draft of a proposal I'm working on for the Computable Data Challenge. It's an attempt to merge taxonomic names, the primary literature, and phylogenetics into one all-singing, all-dancing website that makes it easy to browse names, see the publications relevant to those names, and see what, if anything, we know about the phylogeny of those taxa.

Revisiting an old idea (Clustering taxonomic names) I've added code to cluster strings into sets of similar strings to the phyloinformatics course site.This service (available at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/phyloinformatics/services/clusterstrings.php) takes a list of strings, one per line, and returns a list of clusters.

Following on from the last post How many species are there, and why do we get two very different answers from same data? another interesting paper has appeared in TREE:The paper analyses the "ecology and social habits of taxonomists" and concludes:Queue flame war on TAXACOM, no doubt, but it's a refreshing conclusion, and it's based on actual data. Here I declare an interest.

Two papers estimating the total number of species have recently been published, one in the open access journal PLoS Biology :the second in Systematic Biology (which has an open access option but the authors didn't use it for this article): The first paper has gained a lot of attention, in part because Jonathan Eisen Bacteria &