Psychology Wiki
Don't have an account?
Register
Advertisement
Register
in: Pages with reference errors, Animal behavior, Pages with broken file links, Taxonomy organizations

Integrated Taxonomic Information System

Sign in to edit

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |

Animals · Animal ethology · Comparative psychology · Animal models · Outline · Index

File:ITIS logo.jpg

The ITIS logo

The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) is a partnership[1] designed to provide consistent and reliable information on the taxonomy of biological species. ITIS was originally formed in 1996 as an interagency group within the U.S. federal government, involving agencies from the Department of Commerce to the Smithsonian Institution. It has now become an international body, with Canadian and Mexican government agencies participating. The primary focus of ITIS is North American species, but many groups are worldwide and ITIS continues to collaborate with other international agencies to increase its global coverage.[2]

Reference database[]

ITIS provides an automated reference database of scientific and common names for species. As of January 2009, it contains over 592,000 scientific names, synonyms, and common names for terrestrial, marine, and freshwater taxa from all biological kingdoms (animals, plants, fungi, and microbes). While the system does focus on North American species, it also includes many species not found in North America, especially among birds, fishes, amphibians, mammals, many reptiles, and several invertebrate animal groups.[3] Data presented in ITIS are considered public information, and may be freely distributed and copied, though appropriate citation [4] is requested. ITIS is frequently used as the de facto source of taxonomic data in biodiversity informatics projects.[5]

ITIS couples each scientific name with a stable and unique taxonomic serial number TSN as the "common denominator" for accessing information on such issues as invasive species, declining amphibians, migratory birds, fishery stocks, pollinators, agricultural pests, and emerging diseases. It presents the names in a standard classification that contains author, date, distributional, and bibliographic information related to the names. In addition, common names are available through ITIS in the major official languages of the Americas (English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese).

Catalogue of life[]

ITIS and its international partner, Species 2000, cooperate to annually produce the Catalogue of Life, a checklist and index of the world’s species. The Catalogue of Life goal is to complete the global checklist of 1.8 million species by 2011.[6] As of April 2008, the Catalogue of Life has reached 1.1 million species—a major milestone in its quest to complete the first up-to-date comprehensive catalogue of all living organisms.[7][8]

ITIS and the Catalogue of Life are core to the Encyclopedia of Life initiative announced May 2007.[9] EOL will be built largely on various Creative Commons licenses[10]

Legacy database[]

Of the 483,000+ (January 2009) scientific names in the current database, approximately 210,000 were inherited from the database formerly maintained by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).[3][11] The newer material has been checked to higher standards of taxonomic credibility, and over half of the original material has been checked and improved to the same standard.[3]

Standards[]

Biological taxonomy is not fixed, and opinions about the correct status of taxa at all levels, and their correct placement, are constantly revised as a result of new research. Many aspects of classification will always remain a matter of scientific judgment. The ITIS database is updated to take account of new research as it becomes available, and the information it yields is likely to represent a fair consensus of modern taxonomic opinion.

Records within ITIS include information about how far it has been possible to check and verify them. Its information should be checked against other sources where these are available, and against the primary research scientific literature where possible.

Member agencies[]

  • United States Department of Agriculture
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
  • United States Geological Survey
  • Smithsonian Institution
  • United States Environmental Protection Agency
  • National Biological Information Infrastructure
  • Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
  • NatureServe
  • National Park Service
  • Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO)

See also[]

  • Catalogue of life
  • Encyclopedia of Life
  • Wikispecies

References[]

  1. ↑ ITIS Memorandum of Understanding. Integrated Taxonomic Information System. URL accessed on 2008-04-04.
  2. ↑ Coote, Lonny D, et al. Monitoring International Wildlife Trade with Coded Species Data. Conservation Biology. URL accessed on 2007-05-09.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Data Development History and Data Quality. Integrated Taxonomic Information System. URL accessed on 2009-02-05. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "primer" defined multiple times with different content
  4. ↑ ITIS Citation. URL accessed on 2009-02-05.
  5. ↑ Page, D. M. R. A Taxonomic Search Engine: Federating taxonomic databases using web services. BMC Bioinformatics. URL accessed on 2009-02-05.
  6. ↑ Guralnick, R. P., et al. Towards a collaborative, global infrastructure for biodiversity assessment. Ecology Letters. URL accessed on 2007-09.
  7. ↑ University of Reading (2007-03-29). One Million Species Catalogue of Life launch. Press release. Retrieved on 2008-03-16.
  8. ↑ Bisby, F. A., et al. Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life: 2008 Annual Checklist. CD-ROM. University of Reading. URL accessed on 2008-04-01.
  9. ↑ includeonly>"Leading Scientists Announce Creation Of Encyclopedia Of Life", Science Daily, May 9, 2007. Adapted from a Harvard University news release.
  10. ↑ EOL Terms of use, http://www.eol.org/terms_of_use
  11. ↑ NODC Taxonomic Code. National Oceanographic Data Center. URL accessed on 2008-04-04.

External links[]

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
Advertisement

Fan Feed

More Psychology Wiki