Trends in Taxonomy today: an overview about the main topics in Taxonomy

Abstract

Taxonomy is the science of the description and classification of organisms, essential in theoretical and applied biology. About 1.7 million species have been named since Linnaeus and it is estimated that only around 5-10% of the world’s biota has been described so far, and, obviously, taxonomy plays the major role in this sense. However, taxonomy is in crisis: funding for taxonomy is inadequate, there is a lack of taxonomists, the recruitment of young scientists into taxonomy and systematics is extremely low, the impact factor of taxonomical journals is very low, and taxonomists have not been able to get the society and other disciplines concerned about the importance of taxonomy. Fortunately, during the last years, several progresses are emerging. The general interest about biodiversity conservation, the advances of internet and web pages, the progress in molecular techniques, the development of statistics in phylogeny, and the new taxonomic funding initiatives and global projects are giving some light: taxonomy is getting fashionable again and topics like Phylocode and Bar Coding are among the most controversial and discussed subjects in taxonomy today. This study represents a major summary about modern trends in taxonomy, and the main concepts and topics in taxonomy today are revised.