[Taxacom] Information quantity and decision making / phylogeny

[Fabian Haas]

Dear All,

hope this email finds you well. I am currently writing a paper on water 
quality and taxonomic sufficiency, i.e. which taxonomic level of id is 
sufficient to actually make an appropriate rating of the water quality 
and even decision making in the end. The topic comes up with DNA 
Barcoding, and the time you spend to have an id, which goes then into 
water scoring.

Now, I do have some papers on Taxonomic Suffiency, but would attack the 
problem from another side, namely in more general terms: if more 
information really gives rise to better decisions, or if we get 
overloaded with interesting but in the end useless information. I did 
find a few older papers in scholar.google.com (up to 1990 that seems to 
be a hot topic) and the like. But I am sure there is more: i would 
expect that this problem has been looked at also in the perspective of 
phylogeny with the advent of molecular sciences. Did this more of 
information really improve the phylogenies (and what does improve mean 
here...)

I would be grateful if you could point me to some papers, or author 
names, technical terms, so I can dig further. Like in Taxonomy its all 
about having a name... PDFs are also welcomed (fhaas at icipe.org)

best Fabian

-- 

**********************************************************
fhaas at icipe.org, Extension -2052

The African Insect Taxonomy Toolkit AITT
http://taxonomy.icipe.org


Dr. Fabian Haas
Insect Taxonomist and ABS Specialist
ICIPE - African Insect Science for Food and Health
Duduville Campus, Kasarani
P.O. Box 30772 - 00100
N A I R O B I
Kenya

Telephone No. 	+254 (0)20 8632000
Fax No.	+254 (0)20 8632001
Cell Phone	+254 (0)728 132868

This position is supported by CIM, the Centre for International Migration www.cimonline.de