One Hundred & One New Species of Trigonopterus
Weevils from New Guinea
ZooKeys No. 280
By Alexander Riedel, et al.
September 2013
Pensoft
Distributed By
ISBN: 9789546426772
150 pages, Illustrated
$99.50 Paper original
Trigonopterus is a little known genus of weevils, containing hundreds of species, the majority of them without a scientific name. To describe this huge diversity using traditional approaches would take more than a lifetime, but there is no time to waste! Forests disappear for the sake of ever expanding agricultural landscapes, and good arguments are needed in the battle for the conservation of each hectare of primary forest.
A species discovery and description pipeline is outlined to accelerate and improve taxonomy. It combines concise expert descriptions with DNA sequencing, digital imaging, and automated wiki species page creation from the journal. The concise descriptions providing a valid name can be gradually updated or modified in the fully versioned wiki-framework. A database of DNA sequences with an identification engine efficiently replaces an identification key, helps to avoid synonyms and has the potential to detect grossly incorrect generic placements.
One hundred and one new species of Trigonopterus are described to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, which increases not only speed, but also sustainability of global species inventories.
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