[Taxacom] Species Pages - where are the online descriptions?

[Herbarium]

Roger,

   At the University of Washington Herbarium, we have an Image Gallery
where we provide species descriptions on the basis of the "Flora of the
Pacific Northwest".  Not all species are treated at this point, but we are
making good progess.  The URL for the site is

http://biology.burke.washington.edu/herbarium/imagecollection.php

I suggest searching on the name "Lomatium geyeri" to see an example of a
completed species description.  Hope this helps.

David Giblin

******************************************************************************
David Giblin, Ph.D.
Collections Manager
University of Washington Herbarium (WTU)
Campus Box 355325
Seattle, WA 98195-5325
(206) 543-1682 voice
(206) 685-1728 fax
http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/collections/herbarium/index.php

On Sun, 1 Feb 2009, Roger Hyam wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am looking for websites that have good "Species Pages". By species
> page I mean (and this is my definition) a page that contains a
> description of the species and not a page that simply lists the
> nomenclature associated with the acceptance of a name. You could send
> the URL of a species page to a student who didn't know what the
> organism was and they could use it to confirm the identity of a
> specimen.
>
> An example of what I think of as a species page is  the Fishbase page
> for Gadus morhua (Atlantic Cod):
> http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.php?id=69
> There is a lot of information on this page and a description of the
> organism can be gleaned from it.
>
> This FloraBase page is another example:
> http://florabase.calm.wa.gov.au/browse/profile/26
> Very brief but attempts to define the taxon.
>
> Wikipedia has a good page for cod but there isn't a good taxon
> description so it is a borderline species page
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadus_morhua
>
> Catalogue of Life has a goal of producing a page for every species and
> it aims to do this by combining pre-existing data I believe but I
> wonder where this data is.
> Their page on badger comes from Arkive (http://www.arkive.org/) which
> is an imaging database http://eol.org/pages/328046 and their page on
> cod comes from Fishbase http://eol.org/pages/206692
>
> Pages I don't consider Species Pages are:
>
> Catalogue of Life has a page that comes from Fishbase but that chucks
> out the "useful" information and only maintains the nomenclature.
> http://www.catalogueoflife.org/show_species_details.php?record_id=5347829
>
> The ITIS page is similar to the CoL page
> http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=164712
>
> Likewise Fauna Europaea page for Meles meles (Badger) lacks a
> description because it is a nomenclatural database.
> http://www.faunaeur.org/full_results.php?id=305312
>
> I'd like to build a list of sites offering "real" species page
> information - with descriptions. At the moment it seems like the major
> source of these pages are electronic versions of the literature. We
> have good descriptions in sources like eFloras.org http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=5&taxon_id=242417133
>  and I hope BHL will be a source. This is a shame as these pages
> typically lack large numbers of images and the possibility of
> including other media.
>
> I'd be grateful for any suggestions of sites that contain species
> pages (as per my definition).
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Roger
>
> BTW: I'd rather use the term "Taxon Page" as these things could apply
> at any rank but there seems to be a consensus to call them Species
> Pages no matter what rank they apply to and people are typically
> interested in species.
>
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