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John Doolan
Posts:7
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| 01-11-2006 3:22 PM |
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At the recent Natural History Special Interest Group meeting in Ottawa, three questions arose with respect to the automatic generation of Scientific Name. We at KE are not sure how to proceed and so I would like to get opinions from people about how each of these cases should be treated.
1. How should the Scientific Name be calculated for taxa whose rank is above Genus? Take for example a Family record. Should the Scientific Name be (a) the Family name, (b) the Family name followed by the author and year, (c) empty or (d) some other combination.
2. How should the Scientific Name be calculated for taxa with a rank of Genus? Should it be simply the Genus name on its own or should it include the author and year applicable to the Genus name?
3. For botanic collections, what is the preferred abbreviation for forma within the Scientific Name?
If you are able to offer an opinion, could you please indicate if you believe that it should apply for ICBN, ICZN or both.
Many thanks,
John Doolan |
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Christopher Lyal
Posts:3
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| 01-11-2006 7:53 PM |
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I'm writing from the ICZN perspective.
On the issue of family-group and genus-group names, I would certainly suggest that the name be accompanied by author and date. This is more important for genus than family, perhaps, but my preference would be for both situations.
There is, however, a problem that I have not been able to solve with both family-group and genus-group names. In both cases there are coordinate names, that is names with the same stem, authorshop, date and type, but of different ranks. Thus Curculionoidea (superfamily), Curculionidae (family), Curculioninae (subfamily), Curculionini (tribe) and Curculionina(subtribe) are all authored by Latreille, 1802, and have the same citation. Latreille in this case actually used the form 'Curculionites', which was latger corrected. The point is that each of these names both is the same in the sense of 'original name' and their type taxon, but differs from the others in its citation history. Currently I'm maintaining them as separate records, but would like to see a method of linking them.
Any ideas? |
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Larry Gall
Posts:8
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| 02-11-2006 9:46 AM |
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A comment from a general perspective.
Some KE clients will legitimately desire such scientific names to be represented as the name sensu stricto, and others will legitimately desire the author and/or date to be incorporated.
The default KE behavior might be to apply a consensus opinion that is established by polling clients, but the option to modify locally should be retained. In practice, this means retaining (and/or cleaning up by consensus) the extant code logic that builds ClaScientificName, AutAuthorString, and the associated etaxonomy columns.
Larry
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Linda Ward
Posts:13
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| 03-11-2006 3:29 AM |
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John,
Speaking for the folks in Invertebrate Zoology at NMNH we would like to see the author and date as part of the scientific name. It simplifies reporting. We haven't created any records for just the genus without a species instead we use the traditional place holder "sp." (Cancer sp., Polydora sp. etc.) but I can see the virtue of recording the authorship and publication date of the genus if you were going to use it more as a research tool or for creating some reports. I do object to the recent change in the scientific name that includes family name (or any other higher classification level for that matter) when something as been identified only to a level above genus. If family name, or any of the other fields from the Higher classification, stays as part of the scientific name then something needs to be done to the script that builds our taxonomy summary line so we can avoid redundant data such as "Spionidae : Spionidae : : Polychaeta : Annelida" or "Gastropoda : : : Gastropoda : Mollusca". In both of these examples the first element in the summary is the scientific name. This also creates redundancy in our label reports where we have the scientific name on one line and a string of data from higher classification on another line. The formula to create that string is ugly enough without having to check to see if family, or some other bit from Higher Classification, appears in the scientific name.
Linda |
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Joanna McCaffrey
Posts:40
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| 09-11-2006 10:50 AM |
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The opinion of EMu users at FMNH is the following:
1) We would like to use the same rules for Author and Year in the formation of the Scientific Name that are in force now, allowing the user to opt out of the rule application by selecting 'No' for auto-forming of the name. This applies to the differences in the application of the rules between Zoology and Botany (e.g., inclusion of year or not)
2) Same as above
3) We want follow the ICBN recommendation.
Recommendation 5A
"5A.1. For purposes of standardization, the following abbreviations are recommended: cl. (class), ord. (order), fam. (family), tr. (tribe), gen. (genus), sect. (section), ser. (series), sp. (species), var. (variety), f. (forma). The abbreviations for additional ranks created by the addition of the prefix sub-, or for nothotaxa with the prefix notho-, should be formed by adding the prefixes, e.g. subsp. (subspecies), nothosp. (nothospecies), but subg. (subgenus)."
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