Dear Donald,

Just catching up. There is one small practical point I'd like to understand about Fauna Europaea. You wrote the following:

...

How is Fauna Europaea organised?

• Basically we have a list of 'naked' taxon

names (from the infraspecific level to Kingdom) including full authorship for at least the generic and (infra)specific levels. All those taxon names (read: name elements) have unique id's.

• All epithets are linked to their original

genus, so original combinations can be reconstructed. This is nearly, but not completely similar to basionyms in botany because gender unequivalencies are not necessarily corrected.

• Species names are created by recursively

linking species-group names to genus-group names. Genus names are parents of specific epithets, and specific epithets are parents of infraspecific epithets.

• Subjective synonyms are specific epithets

recursively linked as childs to 'accepted' specific epithets. For objective synonymy genus names synonyms are recursively linked as childs to 'accepted' genus names.

• Conclusion: Names (=naked name

element/author/year plus original genus for epithets) are for eternity. Species names (so your taxon names) are temporary concepts (if they are not basionyms) which don't have identifiers and which are not kept in the database after taxonomic changes else then by version control.

• However, an unique species name id can be

easily artificially created by merging both generic and epithet id's (a trick we also use for Species2000).

• Taxon concepts are not explicitly covered.

Can you explain a little more about how you handle epithet agreement ("gender unequivalencies") in this system? I realise this is tangential from the main GUID discussion, but it does seem to be a complication to the task of treating the epithet as the primary unit.

We asked our experts to provide the original genera of all included epithets. We had a hard time in the beginning to convince especially the Coleoptera and Diptera experts for the need of this additional details, because it is not part of their standard practice to keep this kind of information.

For synonyms there are hardly gender unequivalencies, because for the epithets mainly the original spellings are included which (by definition) follow the gender of the original genus.

For accepted species names we don't keep the original spellings of epithets when the endings of epithets shift because of combinations with counter-gendered genus names.

So we can have the situation: Bruchela pygmaea Gyllenhal 1833 [Original genus Urodon] (see: http://www.faunaeur.org/full_results.php?id=186668) Very likely the real original combination has been: Urodon pygmaus Gyllenhal 1833, but we don't keep 'pygmaus' as gender variant.

For Fauna Europaea this is not a principal (taxonomic) issue, only a technical issue in how to implement fuzzy search facilities (e.g. by trunking all taxon name endings and replace them by wild cards) to lead users to the relevant currently accepted species name. However, personally I would prefer to include all original spellings of epithets in Fauna Europaea the near future.

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An interesting additional story on the subject of gender endings: Years ago most Lepidopterist's gave up the effort of trying to harmonize the genders of genus names and adjectives. It was expected during the last years that at some moment the ICZN would accept this practise. Recently the European Society of Lepidopterist did accept this practice, however, the ICZN did not. Because the ICZN was our holy book in Fauna Europaea and the zoological code commission much represented within our committees the Lepidopterist's were forced strictly to follow the code and to adapt their data as such. Due to this fact now the absurd situation exists that the Fauna Europaea data are incongruent with Lepidoptera data in other resources with respect to adjectives endings. Therefore within the next version of Fauna Europaea we will (explicitly) include two variant gender spellings of Lepidoptera species.

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Next week I will meet the ZooBank people in London and ask about their opinion on keeping orthographic variants for genus names (e.g. shifts from 'Dasia' to 'Dasya'), adjectives (gender endings) and author names ('Müller' and 'Mueller').

Kind regards,

Yde