[Taxacom] progress on globalnames.org

[Dr. David Campbell]

I wonder if the top-down systems might do better on the nomenclatural 
aspects and the bottom-up on the taxonomic questions.  Global surveys have 
the advantage of potentially detecting many names that taxonomists 
unhelpfully slip into less than obvious places, e.g. "I happened to notice 
that this is a senior homonym of a species from the other side of the 
world and am therefore renaming the latter in my local monograph"; "This 
taxon is related to species Y, which deserves a new genus as follows".  
They also potentially alert taxonomists that their work has been 
overlooked.  However, groups of specialists are necessarily the ones 
deciding which taxa are valid species.  

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections Building
Department of Biological Sciences
Biodiversity and Systematics
University of Alabama, Box 870345
Tuscaloosa AL 35487-0345  USA