[Taxacom] Pop article on taxonomy's decline

[Geoff Read]

Try the Biosis graph thingy at:

http://www.organismnames.com/metrics.htm?page=graphs

Numbers of new species and subspecies have been relatively stable at 17,000 plus since 1978 or so.
Certainly no accelerating trend.

Geoff

>>> On 28/01/2011 at 3:57 p.m., Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:
>> Therefore, GNI is not really the place to see how many new species were 
> proposed 
>>in a given year
> 
> yes, but someone might try to use it for that, so we need to beware
> 
> I don't think that there is a place to see how many new species were 
> proposed in 
> a given year! Isn't that one of the things biodiversity informatics is 
> (slowly) 
> working towards??
> 
> so, I think we should be *highly cautious* about any claimed numbers ... I 
> still 
> think 18000 is an order of magnitude too high for 2008 ... but how can I 
> check?


Please consider the environment before printing this email.

NIWA is the trading name of the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research Ltd.