[Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

[Outlook - A.Culham]

Hello Taxacomers,

In the possibly vain hope of clearing up some misconceptions.... 

The current call from the i4Life project is primarily to fund GSDs to help them develop their content, and there is money on offer to do this.  Sadly for those outside Europe the funding is tied to the conditions of a grant from the European Union and this makes several potential contributors ineligible for this particular call for funding of content.  However, the rotating fund run by Species 2000 more generally is a system to distribute money, when it is available, to providers of GSDs on a competitive basis.  There is no intention to generate new GSDs in areas already adequately covered by Catalogue of Life simply because some current GSDs are not eligible for this round of funding.

The i4Life project aims to help facilitate at least some real (human) taxonomic work to help mop up the many orphan names that exist on the web.  Facilitation is through two routes: 1) funded work for those eligible for EU funds, up to the limit we have available to distribute within i4Life, via Species2000, and 2) provision of (sorted) name lists from some global biodiversity portals pro-bono to taxonomists who have other funding (including self-funding) that would like to have some help gathering names of relevance to their work from widely used data portals.

I am a taxonomist and I do think, for areas that I have specialism, that I could sort through a list of names and annotate them.  I also think I would sometimes add them to the database I have operated in my 'spare time'  for the past 6 years.

Gaining a coherent consensus on which areas have no current revision is part of the process of demonstrating the need for funding of revisionary taxonomy.  There is some excellent work going on, Sandy Knapp's (NSF funded) Solanaceae Source project is an example of such high quality modern revision http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research/projects/solanaceaesource/, Paul Wilkin's (NERC funded) e-monocots project http://e-monocot.org/ is another work in progress.  Apologies to the others that I have not mentioned.

There is precious little money available for taxonomic work and a huge amount of work that needs doing.  Catalogue of Life is one of the routes to publicise revisionary taxonomy and it is a route that can sometimes offer funded support.  It is not perfect, I have yet to see the perfect taxonomic system - and when I do I can take early retirement :-)

Alastair Culham
i4Life project leader (http://www.i4life.eu)
Curator, University of Reading Herbarium (RNG)