Hundreds of Taiwanese scientists just completed Taiwan's first catalogue of life, comprised of more than 45,000 endemic species, and the database will be crucial for ecological research both locally and globally, according to the National Science Council (NSC) yesterday.
Scientists associated with the council yesterday reported that they have established the Taiwan Biodiversity National Information Network (TaiwanBNET), the nation's first "yellow pages" cataloguing its diversity of species.
Shao Kwang-tsao (
Shao said the catalogue in Taiwan will be a crucial part of piecing together the world's catalogues. Although it occupies only 0.0025 percent of the planet's area, Taiwan has one of the world's highest ratios of native species. So far, the number of known species accounts for 2.5 percent of all species known globally, and is about 100 times the average number of species that other countries have.
"Globally speaking, Taiwan's database is essential to biodiversity-related research," Shao said.
In addition, Shao said that the diversity of Taiwan's marine creatures accounts for 10 percent of those species worldwide.
More than 45,000 endemic species have been systematically categorized by more than 500 taxonomists and biologists in the newly-completed database, which is maintained by Academia Sinica and is open to public use. Taiwan is one of the few countries to have completed the challenging task. Others include New Zealand and Canada.
Shao said that Taiwanese scientists' efforts in building the catalogue of species that are native to Taiwan is regarded as a contribution to the global project, known as the Catalogue of Life.
The international collaboration intends to catalogue every life form on the planet according to a standardized taxonomy, and to organize that information into a comprehensive and universally accessible database system.
The project is being conducted as a joint effort of the North American Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) and two international organizations, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Species 2000, along with input from a variety of other contributors.
In order to link Taiwan's catalogue of life with that of the rest of the world, Shao said that the database will be promoted internationally through GBIF, a global organization to which Taiwan belongs. Estimating that more than 10 percent of Taiwan's existing species have not been "discovered," yet, Shao said that biologists hope to further work on the establishment of species banks and biological records.
Peng Ching-I (彭鏡毅), a biologist at Academia Sinica, said that the extinction of species has been one of the main topics for biologists worldwide, but that Taiwan has difficulty in working on similar topics because of a lack of basic information on existing species.
As of 2001, the project estimated that the planet was home to 1.75 million known species of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms.
Evidence suggests that freshwater habitats, particularly rivers and oceanic islands are severely affected by species extinction.
Scientists believe that the planet's species are dying out at an alarming rate, and Taiwanese scientists have said that species on the island face a similar destiny.
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