commentary

Challenges for taxonomy

The discipline will have to reinvent itself if it is to survive and flourish.
One reason is that taxonomists lack clearly
H. Charles J. Godfray
achievable goals that are both realistic and rel-
Taxonomy, the classification of living evant. Of course it would be great to describe
things, has its origins in ancient Greece and every species of organism on Earth, but we are
in its modern form dates back nearly still monumentally uncertain as to how many
250 years, to when Linnaeus introduced the species there are (probably somewhere
binomial classification still used today. Lin- between 4 million and 10 million); this goal is
naeus, of course, hugely underestimated the just not realistic at present. There are various
number of plants and animals on Earth. As projects aimed at listing, for example, all the
subsequent workers began to describe more valid described species of animal in Europe,
and more species, often in ignorance of each or butterflies on Earth (see Box 1, overleaf).
others’ work, the resulting confusion and These aims are eminently achievable and very
chaos threatened to destroy the whole enter- worthwhile, but the results are like raw, un-
prise while still in its infancy. In today’s annotated DNA sequences: unexciting and of
jargon, we might call this the first bioinfor- relatively little value in themselves to non-
matics crisis. Using the tools then available, specialists. Taxonomists need to agree on
nineteenth-century taxonomists solved this deliverable projects that will receive wide sup-
crisis in a brilliant way that has served the port across the biological and environmental
subject well since then. They invented a sciences, and attract public interest.
complex set of rules that determine how a A second problem is part of the legacy of
species should be named and associated more than 200 years of systematics. Many
with a type specimen; how generic and high- taxonomists spend most of their career try-
er taxonomic categories should be handled; ing to interpret the work of nineteenth-
and how conflicts over the application of century systematicists: deconstructing
names should be resolved. All these rules their often inadequate published descrip- From paper to screen: is it time for taxonomy to
revolved around publications in books and tions, or scouring the world’s museums for break with tradition and unify on the Internet?

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

scientific journals, and their descendants type material that is often in very poor con-
form the current codes of zoological and dition. A depressing fraction of published being a scientist at this particular time in
biological nomenclature. systematic research concerns these issues. history is the vast amount of information
But today much of taxonomy is perceived In some taxonomic groups the past acts as a that is available, essentially free, via one’s
to be facing a new crisis — a lack of prestige dead weight on the subject, the complex desktop computer. I can download the
and resources that is crippling the continu- synonymy and scattered type material sequences of millions of genes, the positions
ing cataloguing of biodiversity. In the United deterring anyone from attempting a of countless stars. Yet, with a few wonderful
Kingdom, a Parliamentary Select Commit- modern revision. As Frank-Thorsten Krell exceptions, the quantity of taxonomic infor-
tee is currently conducting an enquiry into pointed out in Correspondence (Nature mation available on the web is pitiful, and
the health of the subject for the second time 415, 957; 2002), “original descriptions have what is present (typically simple lists) is of
in 10 years, and similar concerns are being to be referred to for ever, independent of the little use to non-taxonomists. But surely tax-
expressed around the world. In this article paper’s quality”. onomy is made for the web: it is an informa-
I shall first explore why descriptive taxono- The problems do not always lie in the past. tion-rich subject, often requiring copious
my is in such straits (in contrast, its sister Even today, many species are being described illustrations. At present, the output of much
subject, phylogenetic taxonomy, is flourish- poorly in isolated publications, with no taxonomy is expensive printed mono-
ing). Then, after this essentially negative attempt to relate a new taxon to existing graphs, or papers in low-circulation jour-
exercise, I will argue that taxonomy can species and classifications. Many of these nals available only in specialized libraries.
prosper again, but only if it reinvents itself as ‘new’ species will have been described before, These are not attractive ‘deliverables’ for
a twenty-first-century information science. so sorting out the mess will be the headache of major research funders.
It needs to adopt some of the solutions that the next generation of taxonomists. It is not
molecular biologists have developed to cope surprising if funding bodies view much of Two models of taxonomy
with the second bioinformatics crisis: the what taxonomists do as poor value for money. The taxonomy of a group of organisms does
huge explosion of sequence, genomic, pro- One of the astonishing things about not reside in a single publication or a single
teomic and other molecular data. institution, but instead is an ill-defined
integral of the accumulated literature on that
The problem
Why can’t descriptive taxonomy attract
large-scale funds in the same way as other big
programmes like the Human Genome Pro-
ject or the Sloan Digital Sky Survey? All three
projects are enabling science: not in them-
T his discipline is
made for the web:
it is information-rich
group. The literature is bound together and
cross-references itself using the venerable
rules of taxonomy encapsulated in the codes.
But this is not the only way to organize a tax-
onomy. The taxonomy of a particular group
could reside in one place and be adminis-
selves generating new ideas or testing and often requires tered by a single organization. It could be
hypotheses, but allowing many new areas of self-contained and require reference to no
research to be opened up. copious illustrations. other sources.
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commentary
My main argument is that to address the shall sketch one possible way a unitary tax- type material that underpin distributed tax-
problems outlined above, and for taxonomy onomy might be achieved. I am not a profes- onomies do require administration, which is
to flourish now and in the future, it has to sional taxonomist and am under no illusion currently undertaken by our great museums
move from the first to the second model: that what follows will be the best or even a and herbaria. Nearly all these organizations
from having a distributed to a unitary orga- viable model, but I hope it will bring out the are enthusiastically embracing modern web
nization. Such a massive task could only be issues involved. technologies. Hosting web revisions is some-
accomplished group by group, as resources thing I see as a logical extension of their moves
became available. I believe a number of A unitary taxonomy towards becoming, in part, modern informa-
things would then follow. First, the only Introduce as a formal taxonomic procedure tion storehouses. It is absolutely clear, how-
logical way to organize a unitary taxonomy the ‘first web revision’. This would be a revi- ever, that they need more money in order to
and to make it widely available is on the web. sion of a major group of organisms to a stan- do this. They might also undertake the intel-
The web is currently used, if used at all, as an dard decided on by the International Com- lectual administration of the web revision —
adjunct to the distributed, printed taxono- mission on Zoological Nomenclature, or the the refereeing and editing — although they
my, but I think it should replace it. Second, International Botanical Congress, or equiva- would probably devolve this to committees
the core of taxonomy is a description of each lent body (let’s just call it the international drawn from a wider constituency (the equiva-
species and a means of distinguishing committee). The revision would include a lent of a journal’s editorial board).
among them; to this core has been added the traditional description of each taxon and the However it worked, standards would
exercise of resolving their evolutionary rela- location of type material. It might also need to be set and monitored by the interna-
tionships. I believe that taxonomy needs to include material not currently required in a tional committee, who would also deter-
expand to include other aspects of the formal description, for example keys and, for mine which institute houses which taxono-
species’ biology, to become an information many groups, photographs or other illustra- my, and would prevent duplication of effort.
science that curates our accumulated knowl- tions. For some organisms a gene sequence
edge of that species in the way a gene annota- might be required. It would also include a Advantages
tion in a genome database organizes our treatment of existing known synonyms to I believe that what I have described is evolu-
knowledge of a particular protein. Third, I preserve contact with the older literature. tionary rather than revolutionary in that it
think it is essential that the unitary taxono- This draft first web revision would be placed preserves the hard-won successes of current
my of different groups evolves from the on the web for comments from the commu- taxonomy while dispensing with the histori-
present taxonomy. We must preserve the nity, then after changes have been made in cal baggage. It is also evolutionary in that
achievements of 250 years of distributed response, it would become the unitary tax- groups would move to the new unitary taxon-
taxonomy, dispensing with the bad legacy of onomy of the group. omy as resources became available. It would
the past but retaining the good. What would this mean? First, from this set a series of achievable targets that could be
To illustrate how this could be done I time onwards all future work on the group used to spur major funding initiatives, for
need refer only to the set of species in the first example the first web revision of mosquitoes,
web revision and then later to those in the reptiles or plants (and I hope Nature or
Box 1: Taxonomy ‘nth (that is, current) web revision’. The tax- Science might celebrate these milestones as
on the web onomy of the group is thus at a stroke liber-
ated from nineteenth-century descriptions
they do completed genome sequences).
I believe that major government and
The current codes of zoological and botanical and potentially undiscovered synonyms. If I private research funders would consider
nomenclature do not allow original descriptions to think I have discovered a new species I need construction and maintenance of a unitary
be made purely on the web, but nevertheless only to check that it is not already in the web taxonomy — universally accessible, and the
there is a substantial amount of taxonomy on the revision. So what happens if I describe a new foundation of all future work on the group —
Internet. The Natural History Portal of the Natural species and then someone discovers that much more attractive to support than taxon-
History Museum in London ([Link]/ Linnaeus or someone had already described omy as presently practised. It might also
portal/[Link]) provides an excellent entry into it in an overlooked work? Well, that interest- attract new sources of funding. It surely isn’t
these resources, which include such sites as the ing nugget of historical information can be impossible that a major company might
International Plant Name Index ([Link]) added to the species’ web page, but the name sponsor the web revision of, say, the Lepi-
that covers all higher plants; the ant database doesn’t change. What happens if I want to doptera (butterflies and moths); and if it
([Link]) featured recently in Nature’s lump, split or add species, or revise their wants to put its logo on the site, then why not?
News section (416, 115; 2002); and the Tree of higher classification? Then I submit a revi- The web revision would become an infor-
Life project ([Link]/tree), a database sion that is mounted on the web for referee- mation hub, both through its contents and
of phylogenies. ing and comment. If, as a result, it is accept- through its links to other sites. Links to mole-
The most common data available are catalogues ed, it becomes incorporated into the current cular databases will facilitate the increasing
of species names and lists of museum specimens, (n+1th) web revision. At any one time there usefulness of molecular techniques in
although some identification keys and other is just a single current web revision to which species identification. There are already
information-rich sites are becoming available. people refer, linked to all previous revisions exciting web-based phylogenetic projects
An ambitious project led by Species 2000 (which are maintained on the web, so that in (see Box 1) that aim ultimately to build a
([Link]) and the Integrated Taxonomic future I can easily see what was understood phylogeny of all living organisms; clearly,
Information System ([Link]) aims to by species x in year y). one would build in reciprocal links to these
catalogue the world’s biota, and these sites A major difference between this way of sites. Today, a reference to a species in a scien-
themselves also link to the Global Biodiversity doing taxonomy and the status quo is that a tific article usually gives just the scientific
Information Facility ([Link]), intended to be a unitary taxonomy needs administration: name and possibly the authority, but seldom
general clearing house for biodiversity information. both the physical implementation on servers refers (or gives credit) to the taxonomic revi-
Finally, the All Species Foundation and networks, and the intellectual adminis- sion upon which the identification is based.
([Link]) has set itself the goal of tration of the current web revision. One virtue As increasing numbers of journals go elec-
making an inventory of all species on Earth in of the present system is that if no one is inter- tronic, the mention of a species can more and
the next 25 years. ested in a group’s taxonomy it can quietly more easily be linked to its position in the
slumber in the library. But the collections and current web revision. Were the status of the
18 © 2002 Macmillan Magazines Ltd NATURE | VOL 417 | 2 MAY 2002 | [Link]
 commentary
species to change, the link would take you to and thus attracting people and funds into the
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

the contemporary web revision and then for- field. But is such a root-and-branch change
ward to the current conception of the taxon. in the culture of taxonomy really needed?
These links could also be used to produce a Although there is near-universal agreement
much-needed, fair ‘citation count’ for taxon- about the current depressed state of descrip-
omists. Finally, as an increasing amount of tive taxonomy, wouldn’t more funding alone
the scientific literature becomes available solve the problem?
online through projects such as JSTOR I think not: indeed, descriptive taxonomy
([Link]), one can imagine links might disappear completely for ‘difficult’
between a species description and important groups such as many insects and nematodes.
early papers on its taxonomy and biology, Just as Moore’s law says that microprocessor
again maintaining links with the good legacy power doubles every 18 months, there must
of distributed taxonomy. be a parallel law that says DNA sequencing
Many taxonomic works are very hard for Harnessing the power of the web would allow all power increases geometrically. In 10 or
non-specialists to use, sometimes because of contributions to taxonomy to be collated. 20 years’ time it will be simpler to take an
real difficulties in telling many species apart, individual organism and get enough
but more often because of the telegraphic my should also be stored on the web. Even if sequence data to assign it to a ‘sequence clus-
jargon and lack of illustration imposed on they are not incorporated in the current web ter’ (equivalent to species) than to key it
taxonomists by the expense of publication in revision they can at least influence future down using traditional methods, let alone
print. The web has far fewer constraints, and scholarship and research. describe it as new. Just as bacterial taxonomy
provides the space needed for taxonomists to An important issue is the degree to which is now nearly all sequence-based, a new way
be understood. Taxonomy often pays insuffi- a treatment should be ‘complete’ before it is a of classifying insects, nematodes and per-
cient attention to its ‘end users’, the ecologists, candidate for a first web revision. Could a haps even many plants and fish might evolve
conservationists, pest managers and amateur series of intractable species complexes that is totally divorced from current taxono-
naturalists who need or want to identify ani- requiring detailed research delay completion my — a point also made forcibly by Robert
mals and plants. I hope that, overlaid on the of a revision? The ideal solution would be to May, president of Britain’s Royal Society.
current web revision, there would be higher- commission new taxonomic research to sort Would the death of large swathes of pre-
level information, the equivalent of the out these problems, but if this is not possible sent-day systematics matter? Yes it would,
regional field guides and floras used by field I would favour a category of ‘provisional because we would be throwing away so much
workers. For many, this ‘entry level’ would be taxon’, where the need for further study is of what we have learned in the past 250 years
all that is required, but where needed the user clearly highlighted. After all, the hetero- about the planet’s biota, a lot of which we
could burrow deeper, right through to the chromatin-rich gaps in the human genome would then have to relearn. But unless taxon-
primary taxonomic sources. Today, few peo- sequence did not delay the announcement of omy is unitary, web-based and able to
ple would seriously think about taking a com- its ‘completion’. accommodate these radical new ways of
puter into the field as a substitute for a field Is a web-based taxonomy as permanent as doing biology, I fear it will be sidelined.
guide, but that will undoubtedly change and a paper-based one, and are people without The rigidity built into the current rules
taxonomists should be ready. computers disenfranchised, especially those and codes of taxonomy — which include pro-
Finally, the taxonomy should be available in less wealthy countries? I believe the first is hibition of purely electronic description — is
free (without access charges) to anyone who a non-issue; there is not (as far as I know) a part of their success, and changes should not
can log onto the Internet. This will raise the paper back-up to the human genome data- be made lightly. But I suspect these rules are
profile of taxonomy and increase the number base, and the international committee would now a brake on progress, imprisoning the
of people who actually use the fruits of taxo- set rigid standards for archiving and backup. subject in outdated methodologies, and ren-
nomic research. Longer-term positive bene- Access is a much more important matter, but dering it difficult or impossible to attract the
fits will be for a new, young generation of very many more people are at present dis- major funds needed to reverse its slow
naturalists, stalking their prey using digital enfranchised by their inability to get to a spe- decline. Surely it is time to experiment —
cameras, downloading their captures into cialist library, or to order a reprint, or even by time for the international taxonomic com-
PCs, then identifying them over the web — being unaware that certain literature exists. munity to come together and countenance a
exposing them to taxonomy as an active dis- The web-based taxonomy must be com- unitary web revision of one or a few major
cipline, at the heart of modern biology. pletely downloadable so that even continu- groups of organisms (and to work out exactly
ous access to the Internet is not essential, how a unitary taxonomy should operate).
Disadvantages and, if all else fails, a paper copy could be This venture must be sanctioned and sup-
One disadvantage of a unitary taxonomy is printed. It might spread the geographical ported by the existing international commit-
the requirement for more administration, distribution of taxonomic activity if some tees, or no serious taxonomist will waste his
with its attendant costs. My assertion is that sites were hosted by developing countries or her time on it; no institution will adminis-
the advantages of a unitary taxonomy will with strengths in computing, such as India. ter it; and no agency will fund it. If successful,
prime sufficient new funds to counter- it will change how taxonomy is done for ever;
balance this, but if I’m wrong the project Conclusions if it fails it would not be difficult to revert to
fails. There are also considerable technologi- I find that the commonest reaction of taxon- the status quo ante. There is everything to gain
cal challenges in developing the web software omists to these ideas is the worry that it is an and little to lose. ■
to support the taxonomies. attempted technological fix that distracts H. Charles J. Godfray is at the NERC Centre for
A possible criticism is that the proposal is attention from what they (and I) perceive to Population Biology, Department of Biological
top-down, at variance with the individualis- be the overwhelmingly critical issue — the Sciences, Imperial College at Silwood Park, Ascot,
tic tradition of taxonomy. Would one clique lack of people and resources devoted to Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK.
be able to impose its view of how a group is descriptive taxonomy. The counter-argu-
classified? The international committee ment is that the technological fix is not an Acknowledgements
would be empowered to set standards, but end in itself; it is the means of making grass- I am grateful to the many taxonomists and other biologists
rejected contributions to a group’s taxono- roots taxonomy more accessible and useful, who have debated these issues with me.

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