ICYMI,
“AviList – a brand-new, unified global checklist of bird species and taxonomy – has been published today. Containing 11,131 species, 19,879 subspecies, 2,376 genera, 252 families and 46 orders, this new checklist brings together global thinking on what constitutes a species and shakes up our understanding of the avian world. […] The publication of AviList means that for the first time ever, we have a unified global checklist of the species of bird found on planet Earth.”
This must’ve taken a lot of work!
Next: fungi?
Now that would be a challenge given that the majority haven’t been discovered yet. I’d just be happy to have more publically avalible keys for plants and fungi, even a key to the genra level would be awesome.
Or even an offline build your own key I could take with me on my phone, the app trailsense almost has that feature but the default entries cannot be deleted and the tag system needs some work
I was skeptical that this would actually unite all the lists (since ornithologists are somewhat notorious for not being able to reach consensus on taxonomy), but looking at the story in BirdLife, it says the new list “will replace the International Ornithological Congress (IOC) and Clements lists”, which is awesome! It also says “BirdLife International will transition from our current list to AviList over the next few years.” So maybe this really will be a unified global checklist.
From the Birds of the World news announcement linked above:
“The working group of ornithologists and taxonomists behind AviList formed under the International Ornithologists’ Union, with a mission to reconcile the differences in scientific species names among the Clements, International Ornithological Congress, and BirdLife International checklists. The group met monthly to consider questions and classifications across a master list of well over 11,000 potential bird species—pondering and debating over a dizzying array of names, nuances, and spreadsheets.”
(Sorry zygy, this was supposed to be a response to noah_vale - misclicked).
I think it’ll be a shame if this totally replaces all other bird checklists – there’s really no visibility into what proposals they’re looking at, why they’re making the decisions they’re making, etc., like there is with the NACC/AOS checklist. Sometimes, the most educational and interesting part of the yearly NACC checklist update is the proposals they don’t accept. But the end goal is still something I’m happy about.
Apparently the Howard and Moore checklist folks have chosen not to join the unification: https://www.aviansystematics.org/current-concerns. This isn’t too surprising since they were the most conservative of all the global checklists. I don’t think many folks still use Howard and Moore, except for museums (which also tend to have conservative taxonomy).
Still in the works.
a) “A process for submission of proposals is being developed and will be shared here soon”
https://www.avilist.org/about/proposals/
b) https://www.avilist.org/about/committees/#TaxCom
" All TaxCom deliberations and votes are carried out and archived on a GitHub platform. AviList is committed to full transparency: we will make all TaxCom discussions and votes open to the public at some point in the near future by posting them on dedicated webpages, pending the resolution of multiple copyright issues. In the meantime, any person with an interest in a specific TaxCom decision is welcome to get in touch with us and request an anonymized version of the discussions and vote on a particular TaxCom case."
also heads up, I made a flag for this a few days ago, so anyone wanting to discuss this further in the context of iNat specifically, that’s the best place: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/768247
Sorry, I should have been more clear that I was being sarcastic. FWIW I talked to a friend of mine who’s into mycology and if I remember correctly they think some sort of central database for fungi is probably 5-10 years off, and even then it would probably more about organizing at more coarse nodes than anything super detailed. But I digress, I don’t want to take this discussion off-topic.
Thank you, didn’t know this! The way Nate Swick talked about it on the ABA podcast made it sound like this wasn’t happening, but I think this info wasn’t known at the time (or he just didn’t know it.)
Yep, fungal taxonomy is basically a dumpster fire, but beautiful new things are growing up through the ashes. FWIW, most mycologists that I’ve asked about it say that iNaturalist actually has the most up-to-date fungal taxonomy of any online database, which is funny since iNat isn’t at all intended to be a taxonomic authority.