A Nature news article describes a new tool for the computer-assisted standardization of plant scientific names developed by The Taxonomic Names Resolution Service, an effort co-directed by SFI External Professor Brian Enquist, a University of Arizona plant ecologist.
TNRS finds and fixes incorrect plant names by comparing names that users -- typically scientists -- feed into it with the more than one million names in the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Tropicos database.
According to the article, the TNRS team estimates that about one-third of plant species’ names entered into online scientific repositories are incorrect due to spelling errors during entry and the reclassification of plants. That's because as scientists list plant names in their research, they often keep bad records. Consequently, there are a lot bogus plant names in the databases that scientists then share with each other.
Thus, for example, scientists might think -- due to misspellings and errant classifications -- there are Y number of species of deciduous trees in an area when in fact there are only X number of species.
“I started to question our ability even to compare something as basic as species diversity at two sites," Enquist says.
The TNRS will help clean up the scientific record, he says.
Read the Nature news article (June 13, 2011)
More about the TNRS