If you have a taxonomic database and would like to join the Species 2000 federation of databases in the Catalogue of Life please contact the Species 2000 Secretariat as all databases go through a peer review process prior to being included. You can contribute to the Annual Checklist, the Dynamic Checklist or both.

Contributing to the Annual Checklist 

Every year Species 2000 and ITIS produce a fixed annual edition of the species checklist – the Annual Checklist, published in March/April. It is available on CD-ROM as a published version and accessible on the web. The Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life, Annual Checklist is widely used around the world, including providing the core taxonomy for the GBIF and other portals (www.gbif.org).

At present the Annual Checklist is created by the custodians providing an annual download of the Standard dataset for previously selected taxonomic sectors, and providing it to the Philippines office of Species 2000. Data are collated using MySQL and published each year on CD.

The data download and incorporation process ends in December of each year to allow for testing and editing before publication in April of the following year. Once the databases have been incorporated the data custodians together with the editors of the checklist are invited to test and check their sectors and send comments on whether the data are correctly incorporated in the Catalogue of Life (CoL) tables and correctly displayed on the CoL interfaces.

Instructions explaining the details (tables) required, our preferred formats and some examples of the various fields in Excel, Access and Delimited text are available in the Documents section of this website.

Contributing to the Dynamic Checklist 

To enable your database to be included in the Dynamic Checklist your database must be available online and you must implement a 'wrapper' to your database.  A wrapper is a small program that presents the data from your databases to Species 2000 in a defined format.  There are a number of wrappers already written in a variety of languages (Java, Python, Perl) that you can download and modify for use with your database.  The Species 2000 Secretariat can assist you with development and testing of your wrapper.   Instructions for how to write a wrapper are available from the Documents section of this website.