Format: ORAL

Olaf Bnki

Catalogue of Life, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Catalogue of Life (COL; https://catalogueoflife.org) aims to list all described organisms covering all life on earth. COL contains more than 2,1 million described species (Bánki et al 2023). COL however needs to become more comprehensive, including more names and bridging over to genetic resources. Different approaches on how to speed up will need to be explored. COL could also benefit from new endeavours to support the online registration of names. To improve its processes and to scale up its effort, COL has teamed up with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; https://gbif.org) to build a new infrastructure, ChecklistBank (https://checklistbank.org). ChecklistBank is an open data publishing platform with a focus on taxonomic and nomenclatural datasets, as well as non-global taxonomic lists and policy relevant species lists. ChecklistBank is core infrastructure for both GBIF and COL. More than 50K taxonomic datasets are openly accessible for use. These also include well managed plant taxonomic data sources, as well as datasets from digitised literature. Data sets can be explored, published and downloaded through various data standards and data types. Since datasets are processed within ChecklistBank in a similar manner, datasets can be better compared to one another as to the taxonomic overlap and differences. Name matching services are available through an Application Programming Interface (API) and a user interface. COL is a prime user of ChecklistBank. A range of data services could support both scientific and broader societal use. Bánki, O., Roskov, Y., Döring, M., Ower, G., Hernández Robles, D. R., Plata Corredor, C. A., Stjernegaard Jeppesen, T., Örn, A., Vandepitte, L., Hobern, D., Schalk, P., DeWalt, R. E., Ma, K., Miller, J., Orrell, T., et al. (2023). Catalogue of Life Checklist (Version 2023-11-24). Catalogue of Life. https://doi.org/10.48580/dfgnm