Zoological Checklists: From Natural History Museums to Ecosystems

Abstract

Backwards and forwards at once, the zoological checklists bring the past into the present and draw a direction towards the future. They cover historical and current information providing open data for environmental issues. The present-day research framework aims to produce papers reporting lists of animal species, after a couple of decades of absolute refusal of such inventories, years where the prevalence of studies has been focused on ecological or molecular statistics. Now, the contemporary era is moving towards the gathering of organized data, shared on web platforms, and cross-linked in a sort of global metadata outcome. It means that a single record of the occurrence of a species can be associated with its DNA tag, the georeferenced localities of its captures, and the correspondent museum specimen preserved in a collection. Unfortunately, many taxonomists and many countries do not have built or updated faunal checklists yet, though open-access journals offer a platform to share and disseminate such core information and most of the recent checklists have demonstrated the disclosure of an unexpected diversity all over the world.