' is one of the major compendia (in this case, of the names of
genera and
subgenera) in the field of
zoological nomenclature, compiled by
Sheffield Airey Neave
Sheffield Airey Neave CMG OBE (20 April 1879 – 31 December 1961) was a British naturalist and entomologist. Neave was the grandson of Sheffield Neave, a governor of the Bank of England and he was the father of Airey Neave.
Early life
Born in ...
and his successors and published in 9 volumes over the period 1939–1994, under the auspices of the
Zoological Society of London
The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. It was founded in 1826. Since 1828, it has maintained the London Zoo, and since 1931 Whipsnade Park.
History
On 29 ...
; a tenth, electronic-only volume was also produced before the project ceased. It contains over 340,000 published name instances with their authorities and details of their original publication (as "microcitations", i.e. journal or book title, volume and page), certain nomenclatural notes and cross references, and an indication of the taxonomic group to which each is assigned. An electronic (digitised) version of volumes 1-10 was released online by the uBio project, based at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, in 2004–2005.
Scope
The following statement regarding the scope of the enterprise is contained in Neave's Foreword to the initial volume, and is worth quoting in full:
Initial publication history
The concept for Neave's initial work was devised in 1934, with the actual work of compilation taking place over the period 1935–1939. The cost of compilation (as additional salaries, and excluding printing) was quoted as £1,800 in the funds of the day, which was provided by the Zoological Society of London, with printing costs covered by New York's Carnegie Corporation, the U.K.
Royal Society and an anonymous donor. The initial compendium, entitled "''Nomenclator Zoologicus''; a list of the names of genera and subgenera in zoology from the Tenth Edition of Linnaeus, 1758, to the end of 1935", was issued in four volumes covering alphabetical portions A-C, D-L, M-P and Q-Z over the period 1939–1940, containing in excess of 225,000 published generic and subgeneric names. Volume 5, a supplement covering the period 1936–1945, was issued in 1950, followed by volume 6 (names 1946–1955, edited by M.A. Edwards and A.T. Hopwood) in 1966, volume 7 (names 1956–1965, edited by M.A. Edwards and H.G. Vevers) in 1975, volume 8 (names 1966–1977, edited by M.A. Edwards and M.A. Tobias) in 1993, and volume 9 (names 1978–1994, edited by M.A. Edwards, P. Manly and M.A. Tobias) in 1996.
A tenth, electronic-only volume, covering names from 1995 to 2004, was also produced by Thomson Reuters, compilers of the
Zoological Record
''The Zoological Record'' (''ZR'') is an electronic index of zoological literature that also serves as the unofficial register of scientific names in zoology.
It was started as a print publication in 1864 by the Zoological Society of London, a ...
, and made available to the compilers of the digital version at the
Marine Biological Laboratory/
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library,
Woods Hole
Woods Hole is a census-designated place in the town of Falmouth in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. It lies at the extreme southwest corner of Cape Cod, near Martha's Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands. The population was 781 at ...
(see below).
Genera versus subgenera
In the initial 8 volumes of the published work, no distinction is made between genera and subgenera; this discrepancy was addressed in volumes 9 and 10, with names proposed as subgenera identified as such (with "as genusname (subgenusname)" at the end of the record). (Whether or not a name proposed as a subgenus becomes subsequently accepted as a generic name is the province of
taxonomy, not
nomenclature, and thus out of scope for a work such as ''Nomenclator Zoologicus''.)
Digitised version
With the approval of the original publishers and financial support from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...
and the
Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the uBio project, based at the Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library in Woods Hole, U.S.A., undertook a project to digitise the printed volumes 1-9 of ''Nomenclator Zoologicus'', to which was added content from the electronic volume 10, which made available on the internet in 2004–2005. Access to the digitised version is available via http://ubio.org/NomenclatorZoologicus/. It is stated as containing 340,000 genera as represented in the text as well as approximately 3000 supplemental corrections. The content has been converted (via
optical character recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...
and manual editing) into a database structure and is sorted into structured fields (scientific name, authority, citation) which can be searched together or individually; any name that is retrieved as the result of a user search can be traced back to a scanned image of the page from which it derives. Key benefits arising from the conversion of the content into digital form include the ability for a user to search across all original volumes simultaneously, the provision of search via the internet from any desktop (bypassing of the previous requirement for a user to physically locate and access the printed works), and the potential mobilisation of the data into the broader arena of
biodiversity informatics Biodiversity informatics is the application of informatics techniques to biodiversity information, such as taxonomy, biogeography or ecology. Modern computer techniques can yield new ways to view and analyze existing information, as well as predict ...
including its availability for re-use and enhancement by other projects (see below).
Data ongoing use
As digital data (individual records, corresponding to distinct entries in the original ''Nomenclator''), entries from Neave's work continue to be incorporated in modern digital compilations, augmented in some cases with additional information such as present family allocation, nomenclatural or taxonomic status, and more.
Simple cases (single cited original publication instance)
As an example of the simplest case, the first entry in volume 1 of the original work reads
In the uBio digitised version, this has become record #1 (http://www.ubio.org/NZ/detail.php?uid=1&d=1); it has also been ported into IRMNG, the
Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera, where it is record #1157780 (http://www.irmng.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=1157780), and the
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) taxonomic backbone, where it is record #4741596 (https://www.gbif.org/species/4741596). In the IRMNG record (and the GBIF record which is derived from the latter), the name is noted (according to J. Hallan's "Biology Catalog") as a possible misspelling of ''Aages'' Barovskiĭ, 1926 (although other sources claim that ''
Aaages'' is correct) and is assigned to the family Coccinellidae, which is an enhancement from the original ''Nomenclator'' allocation which is simply "Col"
optera
Compound cases (multiple cited original publication instances)
According to the compilers, in some cases it was unclear in which publication the name was definitely established, so multiple instances can be listed, for example:
In other cases, the earliest known publication was deemed by the compilers to be a ''nomen nudum'', resulting in an entry such as the following:
In the first of these cases, in the absence of other information, data has been ported into subsequent systems (IRMNG, GBIF) presuming that the earliest cited published instance is valid, i.e. this name is then cited as ''Aades'' Schoenherr, 1823 (IRMNG
1219290 GBIF
1228684. In the second case, the distinction between the unavailable (''nomen nudum'') and validly published instance is important both nomenclaturally and taxonomically, and so two records have been created based on the single ''Nomenclator'' entry, namely one for ''Ablabera'' Dejean, 1833 (listed as a ''nomen nudum'': IRMN
1396991 GBI
7538591 plus another for ''Ablabera'' Erichson, 1847 (IRMN
1232986 GBI
1050104.
From the above examples it is clear that, although lacking some desirable supplementary information, the set of over 340,000 original ''Nomenclator'' records provides a huge foundation upon which subsequent biodiversity informatics initiatives have built further. An additional usage of the ''Nomenclator Zoologicus'' dataset is in the form of a mapping performed by
Rod Page between records in the ''Nomenclator'' and records in the
Index to Organism Names
The Index to Organism Names (ION) is an extensive compendium of scientific names of taxa at all ranks in the field of zoology, compiled from the Zoological Record (later supplemented with content from Sherborn's ''Index Animalium'') by its operator ...
(ION) operated by
Clarivate Analytics
Clarivate Plc is a British-American publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business / market intelligence, and competitive profiling for ph ...
(formerly by
Thomson Reuters), to
DOIs, and to bibliographic databases such as the
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as worldwide consortiumof natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working toge ...
(BHL) and
BioStor.
Data availability
The original uBio database file used as base data for the R. Page cross mapped version cited above is accessible via the URL https://github.com/rdmpage/nomenclator-zoologicus/tree/master/data . A "cleaned" and extended version of the data is incorporated (along with data from a range of other sources) in the IRMNG genera dataset (versions 2013 onwards) which is accessible via http://www.irmng.org/download.php .
Namesakes
A previous ''Nomenclator Zoologicus'' was published by
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz ( ; ) FRS (For) FRSE (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist who is recognized as a scholar of Earth's natural history.
Spending his early life in Switzerland, he rec ...
in 1842,
[ (by L. Agassiz)] and another work with the same title by
Samuel Hubbard Scudder in 1882,
[ (by S.H. Scudder)] however in the twentieth century and today the name "Nomenclator Zoologicus" is most commonly employed for Neave's compilation (e.g. see Evenhuis, 2016).
References
{{reflist
External links
Nomenclator Zoologicus online(uBio digitised version)
Sample scanned page (volume 1 page 1)available online via the uBio site
of the uBio page scans, hosted at www.insecta.bio.spbu.ru
Zoological nomenclature
Zoology books