Why taxonomy changes

By the numbers, Hoser is a taxonomy maven. But prominent taxonomists and other herpetologists—including several interviewed for this piece—say that those numbers are misleading. To study life on Earth, you need a system. Ours is Linnaean taxonomy, the model started by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in Homo sapiens. But, like any library, taxonomy is only as good as its librarians—and now a few rogue taxonomists are threatening to expose the flaws within the system.

The goal of taxonomic vandalism is often self-aggrandizement. Even in such an unglamorous field, there is prestige and reward—and with them, the temptation to misbehave. But the problem may be getting worse, thanks to the advent of online publishing and loopholes in the species naming code. With vandals at large, some researchers are less inclined to publish or present their work publicly for fear of being scooped, taxonomists told me.

Then you have to obtain a holotype , or an individual of the species that will serve as an identifier for future researchers. Finally, you send your paper off to a scientific journal for publication.

In theory, the evidence you present must adhere to the high scientific and ethical benchmark of peer-review. Publication can take months, or even years. That definition leaves room for what few would call science: self-publishing.

Why not? But then came the advance of desktop computing and printing, and with it, the potential for deception. Moreover, the ICZN has no actual legal recourse against those who generate names using illegitimate or unethical science. Vandals have zeroed in on the self-publishing loophole with great success. Yanega pointed to Trevor Hawkeswood, an Australia-based entomologist accused by some taxonomists of churning out species names that lack scientific merit. Hawkeswood publishes work in his own journal, Calodema , which he started in as editor and main contributor.

AJH has faced similar criticism since it was launched in , despite claims by Hoser that the journal is peer-reviewed. The next commonly used category is the genus: the Yellow-rumped Warbler is in the genus Dendroica, along with more than two dozen very similar species.

Its latinized specific name is Dendroica coronata, made up of the name of the genus combined with a trivial name to distinguish it from congeners other members of the same genus. Because the Linnean system features a two-part specific name, it is often referred to as a system of "binomial nomenclature. Traditionally, generic and specific names are set in italic type, and in some works the name of the author is put in parentheses if he or she originally placed the species in a different genus.

Thus if you find the Yellow-rumped Warbler listed as Dendroica coronata Linnaeus , it is because Linnaeus originally placed it in the genus Motacilla, not Dendroica. We have not followed this procedure, since most bird species have long since been moved from their original genera as the taxonomic system has been refined.

Finally, subspecies may be recognized with trinomial nomenclature -- by adding a third name to the specific name.

The taxonomic-nomenclatural system is a device for communicating about the complexly interrelated products of evolution. Generally it works well, even though many aspects of it are arbitrary. For example, whether Dendroica is distinct enough to be recognized as a full genus, or should be merged with Vermivora and Parula is not self-evident, and ornithological taxonomists disagree on it.

If current PEET taxonomic revisions are at a similar disadvantage, clearly their true impact is consistently being underestimated. Of course, taxonomic revisions of high-profile taxa will tend to become more cited than revisions of groups that few people study. This problem, however, is not particular to taxonomy but applies to any field of study.

Suffice to say that even though a group is relatively poorly studied, active citing of taxonomic hypotheses when appropriate would still, on average, increase the impact of a revision by the same factor as revisions of better studied taxa see example above.

As an additional example, the 26 Anelosimus species treated by Levi , range from well known and intensely studied e. It is useful to keep in mind here that the scientific impact factor is simply the number of citations in a given year of articles in the previous 2 years over the number of articles published in the previous 2 years.

Hence a revision treating 50 species need only be cited twice 0. Underestimation of the impact of taxonomic publications necessarily means that the impact of journals publishing taxonomic papers is also underestimated. It is difficult to extrapolate these results directly to journal impact factors, but one may surmise that an increase in impact by a factor of 2 to 5 for a journal focusing on taxonomic revisions would not be far off. Such an increase in impact factor would dramatically affect taxonomy and the way taxonomic publications are evaluated.

For example, one of the most prominent journals with a major taxonomic component is the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society , whose impact factor was 1. Multiplied by a factor of 2 it would match Evolution ; multiplied by a factor of 5, its impact would match that of Systematic Biology —the second leading journal in evolutionary biology in terms of impact factor.

The senior author was recently reminded of the low prestige that taxonomic papers, and, apparently, also the journals that publish them, have. Just as any other tool, or any other scientific hypothesis, taxonomic work should be cited when credit is due. We are convinced that once taxonomy enjoys equality in this way, there will be a positive impact on the access of taxonomists to journals and funds, increasing demand for taxonomists as employees and growing interest from students in mastering the discipline.

Responsibility, of course, also lies with taxonomists themselves. The impact of taxonomic papers, just like in any other scientific publication, depends on their content. For example, probably the majority of taxonomic papers published currently are almost purely descriptive and restricted to morphology.

Although valuable, such papers especially non-monographs offer relatively weakly tested species-hypotheses and few tools for other researchers. Providing additional information, such as behavior, natural history, species barcodes, easy-to-use tools for identification, and phylogenetic hypotheses, will increase the impact of taxonomic papers.

Clearly, more journals are willing to accept, and more authors choose to cite, papers that test the validity of taxonomic hypothesis with molecular data or papers promoting or using DNA barcodes e.

This is curious, as these are merely tools in the broader toolkit of the discipline of taxonomy. However, at the same time this represents an opportunity for taxonomy and a guideline for budding taxonomists as to what skills they need in order to succeed.

With the molecular revolution and the Internet, taxonomy is changing and currently even top impact journals are willing to publish cutting-edge be it, at times, controversial taxonomic research that combines multiple, both old and novel, tools. Taxonomists should embrace new tools that are potentially useful such as DNA barcodes for species discovery and identification and DNA taxonomy to help test species boundaries and catch the attention and interest of other scientists.

The new generation of taxonomists should acquire the necessary skills to use such tools that, in combination with their more traditional skill set and unparalleled knowledge of their study taxa, can massively add to their marketability in the scientific job market and their scope of research.

To reach the peetsters, we emailed the principal investigators PIs of the and grant cohorts requesting that they distribute our questionnaire to their alumni.

In addition, we emailed directly every peetster for which we could obtain an email address, either provided by the PI or found by searching PEET project web pages, contact lists from PEET meetings, or running Google searches for individual names and emails. Peetsters were asked basic questions about their PEET training and given the opportunity to volunteer comments on any issue.

Seventy peetsters completed the survey, or approximately 2. The vast majority of those who responded were graduate students who had completed their training under a PEET grant or researchers who were postdocs during their PEET funding.

However, half of those who received some PEET funding as trainees in the cohort were undergraduates GrantDoctor, Our inability to reach undergraduate trainees is difficult to explain. However, it would seem in general that our survey was most likely to reach peetsters who have continued work in taxonomy or other sciences, as universities and major companies likely to hire taxonomists tend to maintain web sites with employee listings, etc. Google searches successfully located nearly all of those who replied to our survey, while we were in this manner able to locate very few of those who did not, in particular the undergraduate trainees.

Hence, it seems unlikely that many of the undergraduate trainees have established a career in taxonomy this does not mean that the training received by undergraduates is necessarily lost, as increased awareness of systematics and taxonomy should be an asset for the future of taxonomy. Overall, we suspect that our survey disproportionally reached those who have been successful in establishing careers in taxonomy or in general secured employment in a related discipline; our results should be interpreted with this in mind, as they may give an overly optimistic view of the career successes of peetsters see also GrantDoctor, Therefore, more than half of the gain in taxonomic expertise threatens to be immediately lost or perhaps much more; see above , at least from the job market.

Current employment status of 70 cohort and PEET alumni peetsters. Given that the likely bias in our data is in the direction of overestimating the employment rate and the percentage of PEET trainees currently working on taxonomy, these numbers do not compare favorably with general science and engineering figures data from NSF, in the United States.

In those figures, unemployment rates in were only 1. In biology, a relatively narrow gap occurs NSF, between those who most wanted academic employment Among all recent degree holders, only 6. Overall, One must also wonder if the first PEET alumni will not tend to saturate the tiny taxonomy job market, so that later PEET trainees are at an even larger disadvantage.

Two issues stand out from our survey see Supplementary Material : the immense importance and influence of NSF-PEET in training taxonomists and the lack of jobs and funding for taxonomists once trained. Funding agencies should seek a balance between training and career opportunities; for example, by the establishment of research partnership institutions with NSF and other agencies, or else resources invested are being lost.

It may prepare a student in a wide array of skills and techniques both classical and modern. For example, a search on October 9, , found one job advertisment with the word taxonomy in the text; however, the main focus of the job was on administration and the scientific focus was on phylogeny. These concerns are particularly worrisome coming from the and cohort peetsters, as later graduates may find that their tiny job market is already oversaturated by previous peetsters.

Consequently, it is very difficult for a student to base their career on working on a group of organisms featured in the PEET program. On what taxonomic groups should funding then be focused? If the goal is to maximize the discovery and description of species before they disappear from the planet, it might make sense that new taxonomic training is distributed among major groups in relation to their diversity.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of PEET expertise in relation to known diversity of organisms. The two show some correspondence, but one may ask if this match should be closer.

Alternatively, diversity might be maximized by focusing on clades with vastly different biologies, irrespective of their species richness. If the latter is ignored, only employed grant recipients, and not graduate students, can afford to devote their research to the discovery and description of underrepresented taxa.

The distribution of known species diversity across major groups source: McNeely et al. Smaller bar chart shows finer taxonomic division within insects.

Another problem facing peetsters relates to the core of the PEET program: monographic revisions. Taxonomic monographs are wonderful tools and, in terms of knowledge of the taxon, perhaps the ideal way of publishing taxonomy Rodman and Cody, However, in the era of impact factors, a biologist who publishes few, very large papers inevitably in rather small journals is at a disadvantage to one who publishes smaller articles more frequently.

I would be a strong advocate of publishing smaller articles as you go for the experience and to get the information out there ASAP.

Competing for jobs with few publications, in low-impact journals, is difficult but something taxonomists focusing on monographs are particularly likely to find themselves doing. Finally, unpublished theses in general can be cited and can directly impact science; taxonomic work that ultimately remains in an unpublished thesis, however, is valueless, for it is not acknowledged, e. We fully endorse the vision of NSF-PEET to advance monographic research in taxonomy, but to focus exclusively on monographs may be poor advice to students of taxonomy soon to enter the job market.

We illustrate this problem with a hypothetical PEET thesis on spiders. In it the trainee has revised a clade containing four readily diagnosed subclades e.

The approach advocated by the PEET initiative monographic research and in our experience by at least some PEET advisers would be to publish the monograph as a whole. If the work is scientifically sound and of some general interest, it might be accepted for publication in a journal such as the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society work representing purely taxonomy of an obscure group few people are aware of might not be accepted in such a journal, a problem faced by some peetsters.

A sensible alternative would be to divide the work into four logical units four clades are revised and send each to different, more or less specialized journals, say one paper to Zoologica Scripta , one to Invertebrate Systematics , and two to the Journal of Arachnology all have published papers on spider taxonomy recently.

In this case, the alumnus would have four papers, most, if not all, would be published faster, and the impact factor in total would be 1. If these are all the papers on the alumnus's curriculum vitae, hardly anyone can argue against the latter approach.

Job candidates and employed scientists competing for national funds are compared based on their overall score. For example, the minimum threshold for a principal investigator on grant applications is a score of points solely from impact factor journal articles in the past 5 years. For efficient use of funding in taxonomy, it is essential that funding agencies recognize what is needed for newly trained taxonomists to find employment, and that they directly impact the current job market by funding jobs in traditional taxonomy.

As we have argued above, the status of taxonomy can improve greatly if the scientific community agrees to start acknowledging taxonomic hypotheses as equal to any other.

Combined with use of funds aimed to first advance the researcher, and second knowledge of the taxon, NSF-PEET's ambitious goal of overcoming the taxonomic impediment can indeed be accomplished. Our essay is perhaps biased towards the state of affairs in North America, although many peetsters, like us, are not U. We focus on NSF-PEET for it is, to our knowledge, the largest long-term ongoing effort to overcome the taxonomic impediment via training of taxonomists.

We do not, however, want to downplay the taxonomic crisis in other parts of the world where taxonomy may be fairing worse still. But precisely because our focus is on probably the best case for taxonomy PEET , the problem discussed is likely conservative compared to the actual global crisis in the field.

There are some new taxonomic initiatives in Europe e. Taxonomy is, for example, not specifically featured in the new Seventh Research Framework Program of the European Commission, the major funding organization in Europe, which sets the research standards for the immediate future to Hence, we use this opportunity to urge granting agencies outside North America, such as the European Research Council, to follow the eminent example set by NSF-PEET and devise their own taxonomic initiatives and thus improve the status of taxonomic funding, which remains crucial for discovering and documenting the World's biological heritage.

It is important that the training of the new generation of taxonomists focuses on skills required by the job market and that young taxonomists plan their own career early on. Taxonomy, like many other fields, is increasingly multidisciplinary see, e. Trainees are encouraged to consider alternative strategies for publishing their work and consider broadening their research scope to improve their competitiveness.

Large monographic treatments are idealistic, but for training graduate students, several smaller publications, and publications in higher ranking journals, will usually be preferable when the time comes to apply for a job. Integrating descriptive taxonomy with other biological fields, such as phylogenetics, biodiversity conservation, molecular biology, ecology, ethology, and biogeography, can only improve the taxonomy-based products, gain access to high-impact publication venues, and improve the trainees' chances of employment and scientific funding.

Taxonomy is crucial to understanding biodiversity in a world facing its rapid loss. Training a new generation of taxonomists is an extremely important priority in the NSF-PEET agenda and one that can certainly be deemed successful Rodman and Cody, However, unless careers in taxonomy are available, the availability of training—no matter how good—will not prevent the loss of taxonomic expertise. Taxonomy needs more jobs, and it is necessary for funding agencies to balance funding for training with funding that makes available taxonomic careers; as shown above, currently as much as half the funding for taxonomic training, or even much more, may be lost due to lack of job opportunities.

However, we believe taxonomy is a strong enough discipline to survive and thrive in the changing scientific world. What is needed first is a correct measure of its scientific impact, achieved by citing taxonomic work when credit is due. Taxonomists should also do their share to keep up with the changing field by 1 synthesizing knowledge not merely describing species; 2 embracing and acquiring skills in the use of new tools and technologies to combine with traditional ones; and 3 work towards increasing recognition of taxonomy and its importance among the public and the funding agencies.

We are grateful to all the peetsters who took the time to respond to our survey and the NSF-PEET grantees who helped us get in contact with their alumni.

Both authors' Ph. Hormiga and J. Agnarsson I. A revision and phylogenetic analysis of the American ethicus and rupununi groups of Anelosimus Araneae, Theridiidae. Google Scholar. A revision of the New World eximius lineage of Anelosimus Araneae, Theridiidae and a phylogenetic analysis using worldwide exemplars.