Challenges for the future of taxonomy: talents, databases and knowledge growth

The way taxonomy is done and communicated has changed over the last decades. When the first author started his career in biology some 35 years ago, most knowledge was organized on paper. Scientific books and papers, not present in the library, had to be obtained by a slow interlibrary loan. Photocopies with species information were arranged into taxonomic paper card files in order to overview thousands of taxa. For large taxa such a taxonomic card file took years to be built. We are all lucky that things have improved in the meantime and taxonomists can be much more productive today due to the digital revolution. Also, the taxonomic publication practice has changed. Tancoigne and Dubois (2013) showed, by analyzing data from the Zoological Record between 1980 and 2010, that the number of species per taxonomic publication slowly decreased in this time period, as well as the number of annually described new species or subspecies per author. They also found that the proportion of interdisciplinary publications increased between 1950 (0.9%) and 2008 (27.9%) and that monographs became less numerous. Sangster and Luksenburg (2014) showed similar trends in bird taxonomy comparing publications between 1935 and 2009. Interestingly the quality of the bird descriptions increased in this time interval for example by more detailed descriptions, inclusion of illustrations, maps and sonograms. It seems that taxonomy has become more detailed, interdisciplinary and thus more interesting over the years. And the publication process is faster today. Submitting manuscripts and plates as well as the reviewing process can be conveniently done using online portals. So, is everything fine and the future for taxonomy is bright? Since the signature of the Convention on Biological Diversity during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro the term „taxonomic impediment“ was recognized to sum up the problems of taxonomic knowledge gaps, the insufficient numbers of trained taxonomists and a lack of taxonomic infrastructure. Since then it has been highly controversial how significant the taxonomic impediment really is, but it seems to be a worldwide problem. For example, Venera-Pontón et al. (2020) mentioned a particular shortage of taxonomists and data from developing countries and countries in transition, especially in the fields of marine biodiversity. Additionally, Paknia et al. (2015) looked at the taxonomic infrastructure in megadiverse developing countries and found comparatively low numbers of biodiversity collections, natural history museums and herbaria. A factor to counter the taxonomic impediment is technological progress. Many taxonomic procedures are now facilitated by the use of computers, the internet, online species lists and molecular techniques. Now taxonomy is on the way to grow up to be a modern, integrative, hypothesis-driven and thrilling science. In the following essay we want to shed some light on selected subjects of taxonomy that we think are worth looking at: the problems of the taxonomic workforce, the taxonomic knowledge growth based on the use of databases and web-portals and some suggestions for quality improvements in molecular databases for the benefit of the scientific community, conservation practitioners, regulators, policy-makers and citizen-scientists.