Taxacom: Abbreviations in species descriptions

[Tom Schweich]

I have been looking at a lot of 18th and 19th century botanical 
literature and, while authors used a lot of abbreviations, such as Hab. 
for Habitat, and astronomical signs, the words in the actual 
descriptions of the plants are not abbreviated.  The one exception seems 
to be Rafinesque who abbreviates "foliis" as "fol."

-- 
tomas at schweich.com
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On 5/25/2022 3:32 PM, Peter Uetz via Taxacom wrote:
> A lot of recent species descriptions, at least in reptiles, use a variety of abbreviations.
> I wonder how common that is in other taxonomic groups, and more importantly, if there are any (published) standards for such abbreviations.
>
> For instance, in reptiles, common abbreviations include SVL (for snout-vent length) but there seems only limited agreement on others,
> e.g. for snout length people have used SL or SnL, or more precisely eye-to-snout-distance (ESD) = snout-to-eye-distance (SE), etc.
> Of course, SL can actually can also mean other things, such as supralabial scale (count) etc.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> ————————————————————————————————————
> Peter Uetz
> Center for Biological Data Science
> Virginia Commonwealth University
> Richmond, VA 23284
> USA
>
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