The New Taxonomy( Series - Systematics Association Special Volume )

Wheeler (Arizona State U.) presents 10 papers form the 2005 biennial meeting of the Systematics Association in Cardiff, Wales. Following an opening paper tracing the decline of taxonomy to the publication of Huxley's The New Systematics in 1940 and exploring the possibilities for sparking a revival of the field (hence the title of the collection), papers discuss networks and their role in e- taxonomy, taxonomy as a team sport, planetary biodiversity inventories as models for the new taxonomy, the use of taxonomie concepts in support of biodiversity research and taxonomy, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility as international infrastructure for enabling taxonomy, DNA sequences in taxonomy, the roles of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature and ZooBank in taxonomy, and morphology in the context of systematics.

Initiatives reinventing taxonomy for the Internet generation are leading to a dramatic resurgence in this once declining discipline. Looking at the efforts of several groups to catalog the world's biodiversity and make it accessible, this work discusses the future of descriptive taxonomy. It covers such technology as DNA evidence and its applications, computer-assisted species identification, digital morphology, and E-typification. It also provides insight into effective ways of organizing taxonomic information, and discusses what benefits can be leveraged from a rapid growth of taxonomic knowledge.