Leuven workshop on ‘Taxonomic Disorder’
The name Orestias elegans refers to both a species of pupfish and orchids. Such ‘hemihomonymy’ (when a plant and an animal share a Linnaean name) poses obvious problems when storing data connected to these groups and making it available for users searching for data by species name. This way, it poses a challenge to bioinformaticians…
New paper: Why resolving taxonomic disorder is important
A new paper is out in the special issue on taxonomic disorder & list governance in Organisms, Diversity and Evolution. This one illustrates the consequences of taxonomic disorder with examples from a range of different taxa, and shows how list governance could have avoided these consequences. Here’s the abstract, the paper should be free to…
Project weekend in Oignies-en-Thiérache
Between september 12 and 14, we’ve planned a 3-day joint meeting of the FWO project and Charles Pence’s FNRS project. The meeting will take place in Oignies-en-Thiérache, a quiet village in the middle of the Viroin-Hermeton natural park that is home to a range of rare species. It’ll be the perfect location to make rapid…
New paper out on the governance of taxonomic lists
This paper investigates how the governance of a global list of species could be organized. It concludes that both a polycentric and a monocentric approach are appealing, and lists the advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches. The paper is free to download here.
New publications on the governance of taxonomic lists.
Together with other members of the IUBS Working Group on the Governance of Taxonomic Lists, Stijn has published a new paper in ‘Organisms, Diversity and Evolution’. The paper sets out how users of a global taxonomic list can be involved in managing this list without compromising the integrity and independence of this list. The paper,…
Charles Pence’s Project on ‘Conceptual Uncertainty in Biodiversity and Taxonomy’
Charles Pence, who works (almost) across the road at Louvain-La-Neuve and has been a close collaborator in our research on taxonomic disorder, will be running a research project on ‘Conceptual Uncertainty in Biodiversity and Taxonomy’ starting from 2021 on. Charles’ project will analyze the taxonomic literature and look extensively at how taxon concepts and taxonomic…
State of affairs
Various research lines are in full development: an update. One of our research lines consists of interviewing taxonomists, to investigate how theoretical entities like species concepts and taxonomic methods operate in practice. Arguably, something as a species concept is a living thing, as each taxonomist interprets and applies species concepts in his or her own…
Monthly meeting
Today, members of the project convened for the first (digital) meeting of 2021. We were happy to be joined by professor Charles Pence of the Université Catholique de Louvain, who is starting up an adjacent project in his lab on ‘Mapping and Responding to Taxonomic Disorder’. The main of the project, which is funded by…
Blog post on FWO’s ‘Onderzoekers vertellen’ Blog
We wrote a brief introduction to our project (in dutch) for the blog page of the Research Council Flanders, the agency that funds this project. Read the blog here.
Monthly Meeting
This Friday, 16 October, the project team convened for its monthly meeting. We discussed different research lines and had interesting discussions. One part of the project aims to use qualitative interviews with taxonomists to confront theoretical perspectives and discussions with the actual perceptions and opinions of active taxonomists. However, such social research faces some intricate…
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