Impediment, taxonomic

Many have identified use of the Internet - especially via the World Wide Web - as the medium through which this transformation can be made. While establishment, for example, of a virtual, GenBank-like system for accessing morphological data, audio clips, video files and so forth would be a significant step in the right direction, improved access to observational information and/or text-based descriptions alone will not address either the taxonomic impediment or low identification reproducibility issues successfully. Instead, the inevitable subjectivity associated with making critical decisions on the basis of quahtative criteria must be reduced or, at the very least, embedded within a more formally analytic context. 

The number and range of applications is increasing, particularly for image-based approaches. It is expected that the number of practical field-deployable systems, rather than research systems, will increase rapidly in the near future for three reasons (1) availability of new, powerful mobile technology such as mobile camera phones, (2) the worsening taxonomic impediment and (3) an increasing acceptance of ATI as a viable tool. 

Weeks, P.J.D. and Gaston, K.J. (1997) Image analysis, neural networks, and the taxonomic impediment to biodiversity studies. Biodiversity and Conservation, 6 263-274. 

Chris H.C. Lyal is a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, with over 40 years experience in insect taxonomy, including fieldwork in many countries. He has worked on the digitisation of taxonomic literature to address the taxonomic impediment - the shortage of taxonomists and taxonomic tools that hinders work in other areas of biodiversity research and management. 

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