[Taxacom] the hurdle for all biodiv informatics initiatives

[Stephen Thorpe]

Hi Hans,
Interesting and impressive! However, I think the locality of the trap must have been chosen very carefully somewhere where the arthropod fauna was very well documented! I'd like to see anyone accomplish such a feat in N.Z.!
Cheers,
Stephen

 



________________________________
From: Hans Henderickx <cavexplorer at gmail.com>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Fri, 26 February, 2010 10:23:27 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] the hurdle for all biodiv informatics initiatives

> I doubt that even a single decent Malaise trap sample has ever been FULLY sorted and indentified and curated.

Stephen,

It was as early as 1983 that D.F. Owen wrote "If a trap is left at the same site for a whole season an enormous amount of information is obtained. It is possible to compare sites and to compare seasons, but impossible to do the necessary taxonomic work on all the insects collected". That is why the 8 authors of the book 228 pages book "Brand-Stof. Een inventarisatie van de Entomofauna van het Natuurreservaat 'De Brand' in 1990 / red.: J.W.A. van Zuilen et al, Tilburg 1996, ISBN 90-9010129-2" proved otherwise: they managed to identify all 90344 Arthropoda from a single malaisetrap to species level (2142 species). Not in a single sunday afternoon I suppose.

Hans Henderickx