Recent studies show that there are more taxonomists describing species in recent decades than before. However, whether the rate of increase in number of taxonomists is greater than the rate of new species description has been questioned. We found a statistically significant decline in the proportion of species being described per number of taxonomists (i.e. authors of recent species descriptions) during the past century for (a) families of insects that had been stated not to show this trend, and (b) a sample of over 0.5 million marine, terrestrial and freshwater species. We suggest that this decreased ‘catch’ of species per taxonomic effort, despite scientists’ greater ability to explore and sample habitats, means it is getting harder to discover new species, and supports recent studies suggesting that two-thirds of all species have been named.
Species per taxonomist
The original data sources were the Catalogue of Life (CoL) for non-marine, and World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), for marine species; as described in the publication: Costello MJ, Wilson SP, Houlding B. 2012. Predicting total global species richness using rates of species description and estimates of taxonomic effort. Systematic Biology 61(5): 871-883. This file provides the values used in the graphs in this paper, namely the number of species described per author per year since 1761 to 2000 for each of the above datasets.
Spp per taxonomist data Dryad.csv
Species per author per decade
Uses the same source data as in: Costello MJ, Wilson SP, Houlding B. 2012. Predicting total global species richness using rates of species description and estimates of taxonomic effort. Systematic Biology 61(5): 871-883. This file contains the number and percentage of authors who described one or more species per decade for the non-marine (CoL) and marine (WoRMS) datasets.
one spp authors per decade dyrad.csv
Regression data
Details of regression analyses, including start year of correlation, fitted slope, p-value and R^2 coefficient for the Chalicoidea and Ichneumenoidea datasets.
Table 1A Chalicoidea Ichneumenoidea regressions.csv
CoL WoRMS regressions
Details of regression analyses, including start year of correlation, fitted slope, p-value and R^2 coefficient for the non-marine (CoL) and marine (WoRMS) species datasets.
Table 2A CoL WoRMS regressions.csv
