[Taxacom] Bouquet for EOL

[Bob Mesibov]

It's not often I think kindly of EOL, but their latest newsletter (http://newsletters.eol.org/newsletters/022410/) impresses me with what seems to be honesty seeping through the hype. This is a quote:

"As the Encyclopedia of Life evolves and celebrates the wide diversity of life on our planet, our partners—including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), whose Red List categorizations are found on EOL pages - aspire to identify and document all species before they disappear. The global community’s convergence on biodiversity throughout next year will be crucial to stemming the tide of species loss."

['next year' refers to the the UN's International Year of Biodiversity (http://www.cbd.int/2010/about/), whose messages talk about the importance of biodiversity for us humans and the importance of sustainable development right alongside that biodiversity, as though the two were compatible. And I didn't find on the IYOB website any reference to the CBD 1992 goal of significant reduction in biodiversity loss by 2010, but it may be there in the fine print.]

The EOL quote is excellent because it openly hands to its partners the job of discovering and documenting new species and suggests that time is running out to do so. Note that the 'partners', listed at http://www.eol.org/content/partners , aren't themselves discoverers and documenters. They're data compilation and presentation projects. Somewhere out there in the shadows are the taxonomists who will do the actual discovering and documenting for the partners, and consequently for EOL.

EOL was never intended to assist taxonomists directly, so it's not surprising to find it asking its partners to encourage all those primary content generators out there. I'm sure EOL also hopes that its own biodiversity-promoting efforts, and international promotions like IYOB 2010, will somehow encourage taxonomic content generation, in the same way that a rain dance encourages rain.

I look forward to seeing more honest talk from EOL, perhaps even use of the word 'salvage' for discovering species 'before they disappear'.
-- 
Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and
School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195
Website: http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/mesibov.html