[Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

Tue Jul 24 04:13:18 CDT 2012

Stephen,

Please be clear, my responsibility is the i4Life project, not Catalogue of
Life as a whole, which has its own, separate, directorate.  I took on this
project because I believe that the Catalogue is the nearest thing we
currently have to a complete catalogue of the worlds species, that such a
catalogue is needed and can act to promote taxonomy generally.  

The i4Life call is to edit/annotate names from the global partner portals
that are not in the Catalogue already so you seem to have a fundamental
misunderstanding of what is written in the call.  We have done our best to
ensure the call is in plain English but clearly In the i4Life project the
CoL GSD-Piping Tools will assemble batches of name- and taxon records from
the global partner programmes that DO NOT OCCUR in the Catalogue of Life
(CoL) was not sufficient to explain this.  I apologise.

Research is indeed about getting cash to fund it.  The money we have will
not fund all the taxonomic work that is needed but it will fund some, and
that is better than funding none.  I have participated in three House of
Lords reports in the UK into the problems of funding taxonomy.  The
fundamental problem is that taxonomy does not generally have the immediate
human impact and engagement that politicians controlling funds want to see.
Medicine, social welfare etc are all higher on the political agenda than
naming a new species of tropical sedge only ever seen by three people and
about go extinct due to logging.  In fact they would probably prefer the
species was not described and could therefore not be added to the EW list of
IUCN.

I live in a real world where there are bills to pay, I have a family to
support and food to buy.  I also spend some of my otherwise free time doing
science that I want to do but cannot get funded.  It is all about $$$, as
you say, or in my case £££! Those £££ earned by paid work allow me to
indulge my interest in taxonomy and do other work unpaid.

I dont plan to respond any further to this thread as I have (funded)
project deadlines to meet and that is using my time rather fully.  Thank you
for your contribution and assistance in clearing up a further misconception
about the call.  Ill leave the call back in the safe hands of Thierry and
Aurelie now.

Alastair

From: Stephen Thorpe [mailto:stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz] 
Sent: 24 July 2012 09:51
To: Outlook - A.Culham; 'TAXACOM'
Cc: p.schalk at eti.uva.nl
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

what you really mean is that you now realise that CoL is full of dirty data,
and you are hoping to pay taxonomists to clean it for you ...

problem is that the dirty data is aften in the source databases (e.g. WTaxa,
LepIndex), so if the taxonomists who created those databases couldn't manage
to clean the data then, why will they be able to now? Maybe it is just all
about the $$$...

From: Outlook - A.Culham <a.culham at reading.ac.uk>
To: 'TAXACOM' <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Cc: p.schalk at eti.uva.nl 
Sent: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 8:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

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)

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