Meeting Abstract

33.1  Friday, Jan. 4  Growing the Decapod Tree of Life: Making systematic information globally available PENTCHEFF, N.D.*; WETZER, R.; MARTIN, J.W.; Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; NHMLAC; NHMLAC dean@crustacea.nhm.org

Systematics is unusual in the sciences in that the historical literature of the field is still essential to modern research. In the experimental sciences, literature older than a few years or a decade becomes largely irrelevant to contemporary work. Because species and higher taxa are defined by publication in the literature, the original descriptions actually form part of the data of the discipline. For a surprisingly large number of invertebrates, the original descriptive taxonomic paper remains the only literature on that entire species. Without access to the complete systematic literature (historical and contemporary) for a group, a researcher cannot make progress in the group�s study. Because accessing historical literature is difficult except at a wealthy university or museum, work in biodiversity and systematics is difficult to perform in other places. The center of gravity for work in biodiversity and systematics is shifting away from the traditional Western (and Northern) bastions of research for a mixture of historical, geographical, and funding reasons. The work is being taken up by researchers local to the centers of biodiversity, particularly in tropical areas. That work is proving to be difficult, in part because getting the historical literature is difficult. Our group is part of an initiative to resolve the higher-order relationships of the Decapoda (http://decapoda.nhm.org). As part of that effort we have developed effective means to digitize and make available the relevant bibliographic information as well as (whenever possible) the full text of the taxonomic literature itself. This effort has proven to be challenging but will, we believe, result in a lasting contribution to the globalization of systematic research in the Decapoda.