[Taxacom] taxacom NZ Inventory

[Stephen Thorpe]

not quite accurate: I am under the strong impression that some research funding 
from the IO2 'defining N.Z. land biota' OBI was diverted (by Landcare) to 
getting the insect chapter done, and certainly the compiler of the beetle 
chapter seems very unlikely to have volunteered his time and effort on this. I 
have no doubt that editor Dennis Gordon and Geoff contributed much of their free 
time and did the best job that they possibly could ... pity we were ripped off 
by some other token efforts ...

Stephen




________________________________
From: Geoffrey Read <gread at actrix.gen.nz>
To: Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Thu, 18 November, 2010 5:42:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] taxacom NZ Inventory


By the way this yet to be published book, which Stephen has not yet seen,
is not an official New Zealand 'government' publication. Our government
simply doesn't do much science anymore - it's mostly farmed out. The three
volumes which overview all of NZ's biota are a voluntary collaborative
effort of many individuals and published by a university-based publishing
house.  All authors would have 'donated' private time to it, and the
editor has 'donated' endless personal  hours to it.  It would be fair to
say that the scale of it all, and length of time it's taken - ten years so
far since conception with Species 2000, have been daunting, but his
employer has continued to be supportive. Some of the authors would have
done the work totally unfunded, others mostly with limited funding coming
from project funds competitively won from New Zealand's impoverished
equivalent of Usa's NSF, and a few may even have been lucky enough to do
whatever science writing they like in their work time.

"More than 220 New Zealand and overseas specialists have collaborated to
produce the most comprehensive book of its kind in the world."

Vol.1
http://www.cup.canterbury.ac.nz/catalogue/NZ_Inventory.shtml
Vol.2
http://www.cup.canterbury.ac.nz/catalogue/nz_inventory_bio_Vol2.shtml
Vol.3  In prep.

A pity it couldn't have been 221 collaborating and not 220 and 1
dissident. And the ins and outs of why it wasn't are still somewhat murky
to me at least.

Geoff

On Thu, November 18, 2010 2:57 pm, Stephen Thorpe wrote:
[...]  I would perhaps be useless as a beetle taxonomist, but am
nevertheless perhaps the best person to compile a list of the N.Z. beetle
fauna.







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