Taxonomy primer and other basic concepts

Introduction to Species+: taxonomy primer and other basic concepts

Taxon Concepts

The core of the Species+ database is the taxonomy of CITES and CMS species, organised as trees of nodes called taxon concepts.

A taxon concept in Species+ is a unique combination of full name and author / year. It is automatically assigned a unique numeric identifier when it is created.

NOTE: Since via the Species+ API other external tools have come to depend on Species+ identifiers, it is crucial that taxon concepts are never renamed. They should also not be deleted, unless they have been entered by mistake.

A basic property of a taxon concept is its taxonomic rank. In Species+ the following ranks are recognised (and hierarchically linked): KINGDOM, PHYLUM (not required for Plants), CLASS (not required for Plants), ORDER, FAMILY, SUBFAMILY (not required), GENUS, SPECIES, SUBSPECIES (Animals only), VARIETY (Plants only).

Taxon concepts can exist with various "name status" types:

1. A - accepted name
2. N - other names, e.g. taxa proposed for inclusion in CITES / CMS taxonomies
3. S - synonym
4. H - hybrids
5. T - trade names

Accepted names are linked with each other first and foremost via the parent - child relationship, with the following constraints:

• both parent and child need to be in same taxonomy,
• both need to be accepted names,
• the rank of the parent should be directly above the rank of a child, exception: plant orders are children of Plantae kingdom.

N names are required to have a parent in same taxonomy, but the other constraints do not apply. That is because their status is not determined, and therefore it was considered not practical to have to enter "fake" taxa just to populate the ancestry of an "N" species.

Synonyms, hybrids and trade names are not required to have parents. There are other ways in which taxa can be linked to each other, which are referred to as taxon concept relationships. The following possible relationships were considered, of which the synonym, hybrid & trade name relationships are most commonly used to link such taxa to accepted names:

name	inter-taxonomic?	bidirectional?	used in S+?
EQUAL_TO	yes	yes	yes
INCLUDES	yes	no	no
OVERLAPS	yes	no	no
DISJUNCT	yes	yes	no
HAS_SYNONYM	no	no	yes
HAS_HYBRID	no	no	yes
HAS_TRADE_NAME	no	no	yes

A synonym / trade name can be linked to many accepted names and an accepted name may have many synonyms / trade names. A hybrid can be linked to maximum 2 accepted names (but quite typically it is just 1).

Geographic entities

Taxon concepts are linked to geographic locations where they occur via distributions. Taxon concepts can occur either in countries or territories. However, it is possible to represent a wider range of geographic entities in Species+:

• CITES Region
• Region
• Country
• BRU
• State
• Special Administrative Region
• Territory
• Overseas Territory
• Aquatic Territory

Of which in practice none are used except CITES Regions, countries and territories.

Links

Some external taxonomic glossaries:

• http://ibot.sav.sk/icbn/no%20frames/0120AppendixVII.htm
• http://bionomenclature-glossary.gbif.org/