Tuesday, November 5, 2013

SCIBERRAS, A.(2013) A Checklist of Wildlife .The Times, October 24th:15

A checklist of wildlife

Naturalists like myself who are constantly in the field tend to find several unidentified organisms, from their point of view, and, thanks to the data available, identification has become much easier than in the recent past. However, if one knows local biodiversity very well and has a suspicion that what one has found is new to the islands, it’s a painstaking procedure to search in available scattered local literature to check if the organism is already recorded.
We have tried to facilitate this procedure and I’m happy to say that Brian Restall and I have accomplished such a task by compiling a lot of the material we gathered throughout the years at www.naturalheritagemalta.org. It is a continuous project.
However, I would like to go further and team up with a few people who are ready to compile a checklist of local species.
My aim is to provide a complete and updated checklist of all the biodiversity found in the Maltese islands to date in order to facilitate cross referencing and research.
If we had not been selfish enough that in Malta most kept the data to themselves or to inner circles, we would have had this database decades ago. Now it’s time to change that. I’m not asking for any unpublished records but for scattered published ones to be compiled in a single network.
For many years, I collected literature and was aided by sites like www.faunaeur.org but I think it’s time we made life easier.
Do those interested have what it takes to be part of the team or are they going to follow their predecessors?
For more information go to bioislets@gmail.com. The completion date is December 2014.

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