Six steps for building a technological knowledge base for future taxonomic work

作者：Michael C. Orr, Anderson Feijó, Douglas Chesters, Alfried P. Vogler, Silas Bossert, Rafael R. Ferrari, Mark J. Costello, Alice C. Hughes, Lars Krogmann, John S. Ascher, Xin Zhou, Li D, Ming Bai, Jun Chen, Deyan Ge, Arong Luo, Gexia Qiao, Paul H. Williams, Ai‐bing Zhang, Keping Ma, Feng Zhang, Chao‐Dong Zhu · 发表于：National Science Review · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1093/nsr/nwac284 · 被引用次数：11 · 研究领域：Species Distribution and Climate Change、Animal and Plant Science Education、Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies

Species are the principal category we use to study, understand, and conserve the natural world, so how we define species has a cascading impact across fields, well beyond biology [1]. Despite such importance, debate on species concepts continues to this day ([2] 2020), with consequences for what organisms we recognize, study and protect. Given the wealth of life forms on our planet, achieving a universally-accepted concept seems impossible. If taxonomists wait for a universally-accepted concept, delaying their work on describing and delimiting species, we risk losing species to extinction before they are named [3]. Thankfully, taxonomists have been describing species for centuries [4], so a universally-accepted definition for species is clearly not a prerequisite for taxonomic research. This is reflected in the unified species concept of De Queiroz [5], which separates the conceptual basis of what the word species mean from the operational methods for delimiting them. Thus, taxonomists can act largely free of the daunting philosophical basis of the word species. But standardized practices in delimitation are still necessary to better our operational bases and improve transparency, so we can clearly communicate species and enable their effective identification. Too often lack of funding, unpublished data, etc. prevent the use of multiple data types, even though they perform more accurately for identification when used together (potentially automated, [6]). To further standardi...