Since 2008, the Species 2000 China Node, under the support of the Biodiversity Committee of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), organizes scientists to compile and release the Catalogue of Life, China (CoL China) each year. It follows the Standard Data Set of Species 2000’s global Catalogue of Life to collect and release Chinese species data. Considering the local requirement, a Chinese formal name and its Pinyin, a Roman form name, are appended in species records. The data items include species accepted scientific name, Chinese name, synonyms, common names, latest taxonomic scrutiny, source database, family, classification above family, highest taxon in database, distribution, and references. A dynamic distribution map can be shown for each species in the checklist. The CoL China 2016 Annual Checklist was released on May 22, 2016, the International Day of Biodiversity. We developed a platform for species data collection and a Taxonomic Tree Tool (TTT) for data analysis, which integrates animal data with plant and microbial data into annual checklists and maintains the CoL China database system. The groups of species in the 2016 Annual Checklist and their number of accepted species names are Animalia (35905), Bacteria (469), Chromista (2239), Fungi (3488), Plantae (41940), Protozoa (1729) and viruses (805).

TTT is a web-based platform for managing and comparing taxonomic trees. It allows users to create their own taxonomic trees in any of four ways - inputting manually, uploading in xml, manually selecting taxa from template trees provided by TTT, or automatically selecting taxa from template trees according to a species list. Users can share their trees with registered users and compare them with public trees. TTT provides a tool for comparing different trees to focus on the spots where more attention should be paid by taxonomists or informatics scientists. The comparing tool explores taxa relationships from two different trees, and classifies the differences into different types of relationships. The tool helps to find the differences in the taxonomic positions for taxon A and taxon B, and marks them out explicitly. Furthermore, it calculates the similarity of branches from two compared trees to help taxonomists judge whether the taxa groups chosen are the same, and if it is necessary to continue drilling down the taxonomic trees for exploring more differences. TTT can extract common or different parts from two compared trees and the result can be exported for further tree integration research.