ITIS, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System partnership, received the award for successfully completing a major reinvention project aimed at providing easy access to the first credible database of scientific names of organisms of North America and its adjacent waters. The system also provides information on the origin and general distribution of these biological species. The Vice President's Hammer Award is being given to the ITIS partner agencies for bringing ITIS from concept to reality. Each agency, said Waggoner, has a mission to inventory, monitor, research or manage biological resources. This creates a common need for a vocabulary shared through taxonomy, the science of describing, naming and classifying plants and animals.
Good science depends on every party in a discussion getting the message right.
There is a major effort being put forth among scientists and property managers to inventory plants and animals so that there is a reliable measure of existing populations. The need, said Waggoner, is to be able to document changes factually, not simply through speculation and guesswork. We are proud that we have been able to accomplish all that we have and believe it will make an important contribution in understanding the array of life forms that share our globe with us. Questions of taxonomy will help us define what is native and what has invaded and how numerous each are. The scientific names of organisms are the framework that allows us to connect all biological information.