Lepage Denis, Vaidya Gaurav, Guralnick Robert
Bird Studies Canada, P.O. Box 160, 115 Front St., Port Rowan, ON Canada N0E 1M0.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and CU Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado Boulder, Campus Box 265, Boulder, CO, United States of America 80309-0265.
Zookeys. 2014 Jun 25(420):117-35. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.420.7089. eCollection 2014.
Scientific names of biological entities offer an imperfect resolution of the concepts that they are intended to represent. Often they are labels applied to entities ranging from entire populations to individual specimens representing those populations, even though such names only unambiguously identify the type specimen to which they were originally attached. Thus the real-life referents of names are constantly changing as biological circumscriptions are redefined and thereby alter the sets of individuals bearing those names. This problem is compounded by other characteristics of names that make them ambiguous identifiers of biological concepts, including emendations, homonymy and synonymy. Taxonomic concepts have been proposed as a way to address issues related to scientific names, but they have yet to receive broad recognition or implementation. Some efforts have been made towards building systems that address these issues by cataloguing and organizing taxonomic concepts, but most are still in conceptual or proof-of-concept stage. We present the on-line database Avibase as one possible approach to organizing taxonomic concepts. Avibase has been successfully used to describe and organize 844,000 species-level and 705,000 subspecies-level taxonomic concepts across every major bird taxonomic checklist of the last 125 years. The use of taxonomic concepts in place of scientific names, coupled with efficient resolution services, is a major step toward addressing some of the main deficiencies in the current practices of scientific name dissemination and use.
生物实体的学名对于它们想要代表的概念而言，提供的解析并不完美。通常，这些名称被应用于从整个种群到代表这些种群的个体标本等各种实体，尽管这些名称仅能明确识别最初所附着的模式标本。因此，随着生物分类的重新定义，名称在现实中的指代对象不断变化，进而改变了使用这些名称的个体集合。名称的其他特性，包括修订、同名和同义等，使得它们作为生物概念的标识符具有模糊性，这进一步加剧了这个问题。分类学概念被提出来作为解决与学名相关问题的一种方式，但尚未得到广泛认可或应用。已经有人努力构建通过编目和组织分类学概念来解决这些问题的系统，但大多数仍处于概念阶段或概念验证阶段。我们介绍在线数据库Avibase，它是组织分类学概念的一种可能方法。Avibase已成功用于描述和组织过去125年中每一份主要鸟类分类学清单中的84.4万个物种级和70.5万个亚种级分类学概念。使用分类学概念取代学名，并结合高效的解析服务，是朝着解决当前学名传播和使用实践中的一些主要缺陷迈出的重要一步。
