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The Catalogue of Life (CoL) partnership has recently announced a major milestone in its work, which directly contributes to the work of GBIF.
Taxonomists working with the CoL partners have recently achieved the half-way mark in electronically cataloguing the names of the approximately 1.8 million known species.
The checklist released by the partnership in early 2006 comprises 884,552 species and 68,872 infraspecific taxa (varieties, subspecies, etc.) that are accepted by science. Also included are 495,922 synonyms (extra, and therefore not accepted, names for some of the accepted species).
The announcement of this achievement was made by Frank Bisby, Vanderlei Canhos and Peter Schalk at the eighth Conference of the Parties (COP8) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), held in Curitiba, Brazil, from 20 to 31 March, 2006. Growth in GBIF's Electronic Catalogue of Names (ECAT) is of great service to the Global Taxonomy Initiative (GTI), the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and other initiatives of the CBD.
The CoL partnership is between the Integrated Taxonomic Information Service (ITIS) and Species 2000, both of which are Associate Participants in GBIF.
The initial GBIF Strategic Plan called for 40% of all names to be a part of ECAT by 2006. In December, 2003, GBIF signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with the CoL partnership, and later issued a contract to it aimed at speeding up the work of cataloguing the names of known species on Earth.
Although there is still a great deal of work yet to do, this recent contribution of the CoLp to the growth of ECAT has put GBIF on track to achieve its longer-term goal of 95% of all names in ECAT by 2011.
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