MarBlog

My background is in zooplankton ecology before walking down the data management route. As such i still keep an eye on things in this area, and the recent report from the ICES Study Group on Integrated Morphological Taxonomy (SGIMT) has released their report, wherein the recommendation is put forward to standardise marine taxnonomic nomenclature. No big surprises there – it is an area that we’re all too familiar with – there are lots of areas where things should be controlled better – but you have inherited a system with 10,000 old versions of names and there is neitehr the time nor the money to update it all.

However, the World Register of Marine Species (WORMS) include a Taxon Match facility, which will match up your list of species names with the authorative list and provide you with additional reference information, including ITIS codes (TSN), Aphia ID, authorities, Kindum, phyla etc. which gives you a good chance of restruturing and updating older lists which may have drifted. I tried it out on a list of approximately 7,000 species of phyto- and zoo-plankton (although you have to break it down into chuks of maximum 1500 records in a single match), and generally got about 60-70% match. It’s pretty nice to have clear up nearly 5,000 records for an hours work rather than a long and painful serach of each individual line.