Taxonomy by committee?

[Barry Roth]

An acquaintance of mine is the officer in charge of invertebrate topics in the regional office of one of the US government agencies that manages a great deal of land.  Among her responsibilities is knowledge of the taxonomy, ranges, and threat/conservation status of quite a list of species, and, not surprisingly, she faces some ambiguities.  A number of the listed taxa (1) are not unequivocally recognizable by survey personnel, either because they were poorly diagnosed originally or they are subject to conflicting interpretations; (2) are, at least partly because of the agency's own recent survey efforts, not as clear-cut as they seemed to the early taxonomists (who had less material to work with); (3) are sized up differently by DNA sequence analysis than by traditional methods.  To address these issues, which she perceives (no doubt correctly) as problems for agency decision-making, she is proposing a meeting of interested parties, as follows:
So far, I have imagined having all of the collected specimens of the species in question ... together in one place, along with range maps ..., recent DNA  data and geology/morphology/habitat information.  Then we can look at the entire body of information about these species and try to draw some conclusions about 1) which species are related to which, 2) how can we identify them and what to call them, 3) where they can be expected geographically and possibly 4) what to do about specimens with intermediate characteristicsand ultimately  5) how to treat the various levels of reliability in the database information.
My first response, I'm afraid, was one of horror:  taxonomy is not done by committee; biological reality is not decided by voice vote; how to discover "which species are related to which" is a deep question on which fine minds (such as Taxacomers) debate at length.  Some of the characters that I pay attention to in the group in question are revealed by dissection, have probably never been seen by some of the proposed participants, who likely wouldn't know what to do with them if they did see them.

And yet I recognize that agency biologists, responsible for input on decisions that affect the fate of millions of acres of forest, may need "clean" decisions; they may need committee opinions they can point to when questioned hard about this species or that.

What do people on this List think about this situation?  Are there suggestions for procedures that would lead to helpful decisions -- hopefully not straying too far from biological reality?  Is there a way to harmonize an academic's tolerance -- love, even -- for manifold ambiguity and an agency's need to have its eggs hard-boiled?

The real situation is even more complex than this, but I am hoping that this sketchy description contains enough generalities to call forth some opinions.  Thanks,

Barry Roth



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