Termination of National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII)

As earlier annouced at the whitehouse website, a major budget cut forced the USGS to terminate several initiatives. Among those, all services of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) will be shut down or transferred to yet unknown locations (maybe data.gov). This will happen at January 15, 2012 so if you have to work with the NBII services ... hurry up. These are really bad news, as I enjoyed the excellent web services of e.g. ITIS.

For those who want to know what will happen to all the tools, databases and services hosted at the NBII website, here are the FAQ: http://www.nbii.gov/portal/server.pt/community/termination_of_nbii_program/2057/termination_faqs/7650.

Most delicate, this termination will also be a shock for the WDC (now WDS system), as the NBII was also hosting the World Data Center for Biodiversity and Ecology!

UPDATE:

For those who want to know what will happen to ITIS:

"What will happen with related USGS Biological Informatics Programs such as the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), USGS Gap Analysis Program (GAP), and USGS/NPS Vegetation Mapping Program?

The former USGS Biological Informatics Program (now part of the USGS Core Science Analysis and Synthesis Program) is the parent program to the NBII, ITIS, GAP, and the Vegetation Mapping Program. While the NBII Program has been terminated and its funding eliminated, ITIS, GAP, and the Vegetation Mapping Program remain funded activities and will continue to provide high quality data, services, and cyberinfrastructure to collaborators and users."

The taxonomy crisis: nothing left to discover?

In his post Taxonomy - crisis, what crisis? Rod Page reported on a new publication by Lucas et al (in press) which contains some really provocative findings:

• There is no decrease in the number of taxonomists, yet no 'taxonomy crisis'
• Instead there is an increase of taxonomists since 1900
  
• But there is a decline in the number of species descriptions per taxonomist

This is really interesting, especially when we remember the recently published estimates on the total number of species on Earth (ca. 8.7 Mio, Mora et. al 2011) which have also been used by the authors to illustrate the significance of taxonomists:

describing Earth's remaining species may take as long as 1,200 years and would require 303,000 taxonomists at an approximated cost of US$364 billion. With extinction rates now exceeding natural background rates by a factor of 100 to 1,000, our results also suggest that this slow advance in the description of species will lead to species becoming extinct before we know they even existed.

So what happened, are taxonomists getting lazy nowadays?

Lucas et. al. (in press) propose a different explanation:

[...] the currently decreasing numbers of species described per taxonomist over the past 50 years probably represents the effect of a declining pool of missing species.

Wait a moment.. are there too little species left to discover, thus the estimates above completely wrong?
Interesting, but the members of the TAXACOM list propose some other explanations, such as: 'we know hundreds of new species but publishing this is not funded anymore' etc.

Hard times for taxonomists...


References:

Lucas N. Joppa, David L. Roberts, Stuart L. Pimm The population ecology and social behaviour of taxonomists Trends in Ecology & Evolution doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.010

Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, Boris Worm. How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?. PLoS Biol 9(8): e1001127. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127

The state of the Geoblogosphere – geoscience communication in the social web

Science blogs are new and rapidly evolving media in the social web. In the last years, several hundred geoscience professionals and students have started their own Earth science blogs. Serious concerns exist about the credibility of scientific blogs but until now, no info has been published on the geoblogosphere’s motivation and the writer’s societal and scientific backgrounds. Here we present data from an online survey with 78 participants and from analysis of more than 200 Earth science blogs.

Full article here: http://www.geonetzwerk.org/2011/10/04/the-state-of-the-geoblogosphere-geoscience-communication-in-the-social-web/