WFO contributing to Catalogue of Life
The Catalogue of Life will incorporate the WFO Conifer Taxonomic Expert Network, or TEN.
The Catalogue of Life (CoL) is the most complete authoritative list of the world’s species, maintained by hundreds of global taxonomists. It is used as the taxonomic backbone for Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and other global biodiversity resources.
The WFO Conifer TEN’s classification is the first of our well-curated groups to have been approved and incorporated by the Catalogue of Life. This completes the pipeline from a TEN producing their consensus classification, through to this being part of the WFO Plant List, published in Zenodo and ChecklistBank, and now its inclusion in CoL. CoL is used as the taxonomic backbone for GIBF and other global biodiversity resources, and this step significantly extends the impact and uptake of the work of TENs and WFO.
The data, referred to as “WFO Pinopsida”, includes the community consensus classification for ranks above family proposed by Yang et al. 2022, which the WFO follows, and the highly curated family classifications for Conifer groups provided by the Conifer TEN. The data can be explored here. Accreditation of the source dataset is given here and the dataset is citable with a DOI:
World Flora Online, & Thomas, P. (2023). Pinopsida from WFO. In O. Bánki, Y. Roskov, M. Döring, G. Ower, D. R. Hernández Robles, C. A. Plata Corredor, T. Stjernegaard Jeppesen, A. Örn, L. Vandepitte, D. Hobern, P. Schalk, R. E. DeWalt, K. Ma, J. Miller, T. Orrell, R. Aalbu, J. Abbott, R. Adlard, C. Aedo, et al., Catalogue of Life Checklist (Version 2023-12). World Flora Online. https://doi.org/10.48580/dg4lg-4f5
The WFO has worked closely with CoL and GBIF to facilitate this process, including representation on the CoL Global Team, and the strength of the WFO data can be seen in the five-star rating it received from CoL.
We are now working with the CoL team to include more TEN family datasets into CoL as their data reaches the quality thresholds required by CoL.
Posted: 1 May 2024
Edited: 7th May 2024