Building: Main Building 1st Floor
Room: Salone degli Oceani
Last modified: 2013-10-07
Abstract
Fauna Europaea makes all scientific names of all European land and freshwater animals integrally available in one authoritative database via the Fauna Europaea web portal (http://www.faunaeur.org). Fauna Europaea covers about 240.000 taxon names, including 145.000 accepted (sub)species, brought together by more then 400 specialists.
Fauna Europaea started in March 2000 as an European Commission funded project, providing a web based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level (up to Ural, excluding Caucasus region), and some additional optional information. Fauna Europaea is a unique (standard) reference for many users in science, government, industry, nature conservation, and education.
To ensure the collation of high quality data, more then 400 specialists, including 65 Group Coordinators are contracted. Advanced on-line and off-line tools for data import and data management were developed, and innovative procedures for data validating applied, including regional and thematic expertise meetings, and digital tools to check for technical and logical correctness. Expansion of the current geographic coverage of Fauna Europaea, to also include the non-European parts of Northern Asia, and the inclusion of additional data types is in preparation.
Fauna Europaea is part of the pan-European Species-infrastructure (PESI), providing an integrated Taxonomic Backbone for Europe, supporting major biodiversity informatics initiatives like LifeWatch, EU BON, GBIF and Global Names Architecture (GNA).
As part of the ViBRANT project, the Fauna Europaea hosting has been migrated to the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) in Berlin and will be included into the EDIT Cybertaxonomy Platform developed by Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM). In the recently started EU BON project (http://eubon.eu), further steps will be made to advance the further integration and application into the e-Taxonomy and e-Science domains as well as the use of Fauna Europaea as a basic tool for biodiversity assessment and taxonomic expertise evaluation and management.