Fauna Europaea – all European animal species on the web

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Abstract

Fauna Europaea is Europe's main zoological taxonomic index, making the scientific names and distributions of all living, currently known, multicellular, European land and freshwater animals species integrally available in one authoritative database. Fauna Europaea covers about 260,000 taxon names, including 145,000 accepted (sub)species, assembled by a large network of (>400) leading specialists, using advanced electronic tools for data collations with data quality assured through sophisticated validation routines. Fauna Europaea started in 2000 as an EC funded FP5 project and provides a unique taxonomic reference for many user-groups such as scientists, governments, industries, nature conservation communities and educational programs. Fauna Europaea was formally accepted as an INSPIRE standard for Europe, as part of the European Taxonomic Backbone established in PESI.

Fauna Europaea provides a public web portal at faunaeur.org with links to other key biodiversity services, is installed as a taxonomic backbone in wide range of biodiversity services and actively contributes to biodiversity informatics innovations in various initiatives and EC programs.

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Genetic Patterns in European Geometrid Moths Revealed by the Barcode Index Number (BIN) System

Axel Hausmann, H. Godfray, Peter Huemer … (2013)

Background The geometrid moths of Europe are one of the best investigated insect groups in traditional taxonomy making them an ideal model group to test the accuracy of the Barcode Index Number (BIN) system of BOLD (Barcode of Life Datasystems), a method that supports automated, rapid species delineation and identification. Methodology/Principal Findings This study provides a DNA barcode library for 219 of the 249 European geometrid moth species (88%) in five selected subfamilies. The data set includes COI sequences for 2130 specimens. Most species (93%) were found to possess diagnostic barcode sequences at the European level while only three species pairs (3%) were genetically indistinguishable in areas of sympatry. As a consequence, 97% of the European species we examined were unequivocally discriminated by barcodes within their natural areas of distribution. We found a 1:1 correspondence between BINs and traditionally recognized species for 67% of these species. Another 17% of the species (15 pairs, three triads) shared BINs, while specimens from the remaining species (18%) were divided among two or more BINs. Five of these species are mixtures, both sharing and splitting BINs. For 82% of the species with two or more BINs, the genetic splits involved allopatric populations, many of which have previously been hypothesized to represent distinct species or subspecies. Conclusions/Significance This study confirms the effectiveness of DNA barcoding as a tool for species identification and illustrates the potential of the BIN system to characterize formal genetic units independently of an existing classification. This suggests the system can be used to efficiently assess the biodiversity of large, poorly known assemblages of organisms. For the moths examined in this study, cases of discordance between traditionally recognized species and BINs arose from several causes including overlooked species, synonymy, and cases where DNA barcodes revealed regional variation of uncertain taxonomic significance.

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Allopatry as a Gordian Knot for Taxonomists: Patterns of DNA Barcode Divergence in Arctic-Alpine Lepidoptera

Marko Mutanen, Axel Hausmann, Paul Hebert … (2012)

Many cold adapted species occur in both montane settings and in the subarctic. Their disjunct distributions create taxonomic complexity because there is no standardized method to establish whether their allopatric populations represent single or different species. This study employs DNA barcoding to gain new perspectives on the levels and patterns of sequence divergence among populations of 122 arctic-alpine species of Lepidoptera from the Alps, Fennoscandia and North America. It reveals intraspecific variability in the barcode region ranging from 0.00–10.08%. Eleven supposedly different species pairs or groups show close genetic similarity, suggesting possible synonymy in many cases. However, a total of 33 species show evidence of cryptic diversity as evidenced by the presence of lineages with over 2% maximum barcode divergence in Europe, in North America or between the two continents. Our study also reveals cases where taxonomic names have been used inconsistently between regions and exposes misidentifications. Overall, DNA barcodes have great potential to both increase taxonomic resolution and to make decisions concerning the taxonomic status of allopatric populations more objective.

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New Species in the Old World: Europe as a Frontier in Biodiversity Exploration, a Test Bed for 21st Century Taxonomy

Benoît Fontaine, Kees van Achterberg, Miguel Angel Alonso-Zarazaga … (2012)

The number of described species on the planet is about 1.9 million, with ca. 17,000 new species described annually, mostly from the tropics. However, taxonomy is usually described as a science in crisis, lacking manpower and funding, a politically acknowledged problem known as the Taxonomic Impediment. Using data from the Fauna Europaea database and the Zoological Record, we show that contrary to general belief, developed and heavily-studied parts of the world are important reservoirs of unknown species. In Europe, new species of multicellular terrestrial and freshwater animals are being discovered and named at an unprecedented rate: since the 1950s, more than 770 new species are on average described each year from Europe, which add to the 125,000 terrestrial and freshwater multicellular species already known in this region. There is no sign of having reached a plateau that would allow for the assessment of the magnitude of European biodiversity. More remarkably, over 60% of these new species are described by non-professional taxonomists. Amateurs are recognized as an essential part of the workforce in ecology and astronomy, but the magnitude of non-professional taxonomist contributions to alpha-taxonomy has not been fully realized until now. Our results stress the importance of developing a system that better supports and guides this formidable workforce, as we seek to overcome the Taxonomic Impediment and speed up the process of describing the planetary biodiversity before it is too late.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Yde de Jong

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Biodivers Data J

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Biodivers Data J

Journal ID (pmc): Biodiversity Data Journal

Journal ID (publisher-id): Biodiversity Data Journal

Title: Biodiversity Data Journal

Publisher: Pensoft Publishers

ISSN (Print): 1314-2836

ISSN (Electronic): 1314-2828

Publication date Collection: 2014

Publication date (Electronic): 17 September 2014

Issue: 2

Electronic Location Identifier: e4034

Affiliations

[† ]University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

[‡ ]University of Amsterdam - Faculty of Science, Amsterdam, Netherlands

[§ ]Unaffiliated, Basel, Switzerland

[| ]Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark

[¶ ]Danish Agency for Digitisation, Copenhagen, Denmark

[# ]University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

[†† ]Unaffilated, Copenhagen, Denmark

[‡‡ ]WorldFish Center, Los Baños, Philippines

[§§ ]ISUPNAT, Viroflay, France

[|| ]Institute of Zoology, Warsaw, Poland

[¶¶ ]Department of Zoology, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia

[## ]Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany

[††† ]FU Berlin, Berlin, Germany

[‡‡‡ ]National Museum of Natural History and Pensoft Publishers, Sofia, Bulgaria

[§§§ ]Institute of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Pensoft Publishers, Sofia, Bulgaria

[||| ]Pensoft Publishers, Sofia, Bulgaria

Author notes

Corresponding author: Yde de Jong ( mail@ 123456yjong.net ).

Academic editor: Vincent Smith.

Article

Publisher ID: Biodiversity Data Journal Other ID: 2399

DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e4034

PMC ID: 4206781

PubMed ID: 25349527

SO-VID: fbec9263-e35b-4afe-b3ce-c9fcf77541c8

Copyright © Yde de Jong, Melina Verbeek, Verner Michelsen, Per de Place Bjørn, Wouter Los, Fedor Steeman, Nicolas Bailly, Claire Basire, Przemek Chylarecki, Eduard Stloukal, Gregor Hagedorn, Florian Tobias Wetzel, Falko Glöckler, Alexander Kroupa, Günther Korb, Anke Hoffmann, Christoph Häuser, Andreas Kohlbecker, Andreas Müller, Anton Güntsch, Pavel Stoev, Lyubomir Penev

License:

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

History

Date received : 10 September 2014

Date accepted : 17 September 2014

Page count

Figures: 15, Tables: 2, References: 32

Funding

Funded by: Fauna Europaea was funded by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework Programme and contributed to the Support for Research Infrastructures work programme with Thematic Priority Biodiversity (EVR1-1999-20001) for a period of four years (1 March 2000 - 1 March 2004), including a short 'NAS extension', allowing EU candidate accession countries to participate. Follow-up support was given by the EC-FP5 EuroCAT project (EVR1-CT-2002-20011), by the EC-FP6 ENBI project (EVK2-CT-2002-20020), by the EC-FP6 EDIT project (GCE 018340), by the EC-FP7 PESI project (RI-223806) and by the EC-FP7 ViBRANT project (RI-261532). A gap analysis was supported by the EC-FP7 project EU BON (308454). Continuing management and hosting of the Fauna Europaea services was supported by the University of Amsterdam (Zoological Museum Amsterdam) and SARA/Vancis. Recently the hosting of Fauna Europaea is taken over by the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, supported by the EC-FP7 EU BON project (grant agreement №308454).

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Fauna Europaea – all European animal species on the web

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Abstract

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Pensoft Biodiversity

Most cited references 20

Genetic Patterns in European Geometrid Moths Revealed by the Barcode Index Number (BIN) System

Allopatry as a Gordian Knot for Taxonomists: Patterns of DNA Barcode Divergence in Arctic-Alpine Lepidoptera

New Species in the Old World: Europe as a Frontier in Biodiversity Exploration, a Test Bed for 21st Century Taxonomy

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