WORLD REGISTER OF MARINE SPECIES AND THE CATALOGUE OF LIFE

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World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS),

contribution to the Catalogue of Life (CoL)

Ward Appeltans, Bart Vanhoorne, Wim Decock

Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ)

Oostende (Belgium)



www.marinespecies.org



WoRMS in a nutshell• Started in 2007. Grew out of ERMS through EU FP 6

MarBEF;• Expert-based, taxonomic database (not a name’s

index)• Species are classified in a taxonomic tree, and linked with

synonyms and commonly used spelling mistakes;

• Permanent host institute: VLIZ• Web-based, incl webservices• Follows international standards and serve permanent

Global Unique IDs (LSIDs) http://www.tdwg.org/standards/150/download/



WoRMS management

• WoRMS is created by an editorial board of 250 taxonomists from 176 institutions in 33 countries.

• The editors are united under the umbrella of the Society for the Management of Electronic Biodiversity data (SMEBD), which main aim is to protect editors’ IPR and to represent the network internationally.

• The WoRMS Steering Committee coordinates the network.

• The Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) is publishing the database and provides data management support and IT tools.



Statistics• 436,500 taxa;

• 213,000 accepted marine species names;

• 17,000 accepted non-marine species names;

• 139,000 synonyms (incl common misspellings);

• 44,000 vernacular names (138 languages);

• 150,000 key literature references;

• 45,000 specimen details;

• 328,000 published distributions;

• 510,000 web links;

• 20,000 images;

• and many other species related information (biology, habitat, feeding type , e.g. 17,000 parasite-host relationships…).



Status

• If 230,000 valid marine species– WoRMS = 92% (213K spp) complete, but 20K

(9%) not yet expert-validated– Gaps are: Gastropoda (6,000spp), parasitic Nematoda

(4,400spp), Digenea (4,200spp), Ostracoda (3,500spp), Bacillariophyceae (2,000spp) en Cyanobacteria (500spp).

– In 2011, >100 tax editors: • Added: +35,219 taxa (30,056 spp and subspp (incl

synonyms);

• Updated: 25,000 spp.



WoRMS usersWoRMS is a standard taxonomic reference for many

organizations and programmes (e.g. GBIF, OBIS, CoL, EoL, ICES, IODE, SeaDataNet, FAO …)• >60 organisations requested download access.

The website has • In 2011: 31M hits; 632.000 unique visitors;

• ~3M hits/month; ~5,000 unique visitors per day (excl weekends);

• >500 citations in Google Scholar (increasing @ 1/day).

The Web Services and the Taxon Match tool are used extensively for quality control purposes.• 28 institutes are using the web service;

• >5,142 species lists are matched (avg 14/day) .



All names stored locally in Aphia database

71 GSDs 10 RSDs

9 ext. GSDs3 TSDs

WoRMS integrates over 100 global, regional and thematic species databases into a common IT platform, which means every species occurs in the system only once.



www.marinespecies.org/carms



www.marinespecies.org/copepoda



www.marinespecies.org/hab



www.marinespecies.org/urmo



Web portal



Web portal

Scientific Name + AuthorityParent /Child taxon

Taxon/Name statusScrutiny/record status

Taxon rank

Invalid synonyms

Literature sources



Vernaculars ‘138 languages’

Environment + fossil flags

Distributions

Ecological traits

Deep links (incl webservices of GenBank, BOLD, BHL)

Free notes



Type specimens



Edit session

LSID

CitationLicense



Access Services

• Match and extract information from WoRMS using:– Taxon Match tool– Webservice– File transfer

• E.g.:– Queries: classification, resolve spelling,

synonyms, common names, ...– Sharing images, distribution layers, PDFs of

original descriptions



WoRMS contribution to CoL

• 2009: 6 GSDs + URMO

• 2011: 21 GSDs + URMO (+15)

• 2012: 28 GSDs + URMO (+7 & 22 updates)

# species DB

59,500 WoRMS (28 GSDs)

12,500 URMO (31 GSDs)

72,000 33% of WoRMS



WoRMS contribution to CoL

• Adopted to a large extent the CoL management hierarchy;

• Mapped WoRMS to CoL schema;

• Export to CoL:– (via script) Automated export generation (WoRMS) & automated

harvest (CoL)– Tab-delimited file transfer (incl metadata)– Daily/weekly/montly updatable

WoRMS is now also available in DwC-A



Marine species (estimated valid): data sources

• Bacteria & Archaea (2,500spp): MICROBIS (BIOS in CoL)

• Fungi (1,000spp): Index Fungorum

• Plantae (7,500spp): AlgaeBase

• Chromista (19,000spp): AlgaeBase

• Protozoa (500spp): various

• Animalia (200,000spp): various



Marine species (estimated accepted): data sources

• Animalia (200,000spp) – Various sources (taxon groups):

• WoRMS, URMO (58)• ITIS (31)• NZOR (8)• ETI (1)• FADA (1)• TIGR (1)• ZOBODAT (1)



Marine species gaps in CoL 2012

Size (# spp) Taxon groups

>30,000 Mollusca

>8,000 Nematoda

>8,000 Platyhelminthes

5,000 Crustacea (2,000 decapods)

500 Echinodermata (crinoids)

200 Protozoa

>51,500



Conclusion• Animalia:

– Taxa with exclusive marine spp mostly from WoRMS/URMO;

– Taxa with non-marine representatives (e.g. birds, fish, mammals, annelids, chelicerata, hexapods) mostly from other sources (ITIS the biggest);

• Plants & Chromista: from AlgaeBase;• Fungi: from Species Fungorum;• Bacteria & Archaea: from BIOS (but no marine

flags)



Conclusion• Need to fill the latest gaps, >50,000 spp

(22%) marine species;

• Automated harvest routines (what frequency?);

• CoL will soon have close to 100 GSDs from WoRMS:– Should we go for one WoRMS GSD minus x

number of taxon groups? So “group by providers” instead of taxon group.

WORLD REGISTER OF MARINE SPECIES AND THE CATALOGUE OF LIFE

Technology

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