Supporting species in ODE : explaining and citing
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EDITORIAL
Supporting species in ODE: explaining and citing Olaf R. P. Bininda-Emonds
Received: 28 January 2011 / Accepted: 28 January 2011 / Published online: 12 February 2011 # Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik 2011
Species represent the fundamental unit in biology. This remains true despite a huge and ongoing debate as to exactly what species are and how best to delineate those species in the world around us. Indeed, taxonomic disagreements as to the species status of a particular taxon can often rest on the species criterion that has been applied. As shown by the study of Agapow et al. (2004), the choice of species concept can often result in large differences in the number of recognized species, even for well-studied groups. Although DNA taxonomy (Tautz et al. 2003) has been disparaged by some for potentially making the problem worse or the species delineations more subjective (Lipscomb et al. 2003; Seberg et al. 2003), molecular data merely add another source of data to an already subjective exercise. Thus, it is important that descriptions of new species as well as redefinitions of existing ones be accompanied by an explicit statement of the species concept upon which these judgments are based. As of the current issue of Organisms Diversity & Evolution (ODE), this will become a formal requirement for all relevant papers. Inclusion of this extra bit of information will by no means end any taxonomic disagreements over a particular taxon, but could help inform if the disagreement at least derives from the application of two different species concepts and might somehow be reconcilable. As de Queiroz (2007) has recently in part argued, many species concepts might not be mutually
O. R. P. Bininda-Emonds (*) AG Systematik und Evolutionsbiologie, IBU – Fakultät V, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Carl von Ossietzky Strasse 9–11, 26111 Oldenburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
exclusive, but instead segregated along a temporal dimension, characterizing and emphasizing different processes during speciation. In other words, apparent taxonomic conflict might not be true conflict, something that the additional information could help to tease out. In this, it should be apparent that species descriptions and redefinitions — and indeed the analogous processes for taxa of any level — represent clear scientific hypotheses that ought to be cited as such. (An article expanding on these ideas should hopefully appear later this year in ODE.) Very often, however, this is not the case, even in the taxonomic literature. Either the authors responsible for the species names are not cited whatsoever or are presented after the species name in the main text, but without the corresponding paper being included in the reference list. The latter, in fact, represents the halfway-house strategy that ODE has used since its inception. It is only in rare cases (e.g., Zootaxa), that a journal consistently requires the full and proper citation of papers associated with a species description. Why exactly this has beco
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