Stephen T. Garnett, Les Christidis, Richard Pyle and Scott Thomson

“ In a paper published this month, we proposed a new set of principles to guide what one day, we hope, will be a single authoritative list of the world’s species. This would help manage and conserve them for future generations. ”

“ They argued taxonomy needed rules around what should be called a species, because currently there are none. They wrote:
for a discipline aiming to impose order on the natural world, taxonomy (the classification of complex organisms) is remarkably anarchic [...] There is reasonable agreement among taxonomists that a species should represent a distinct evolutionary lineage. But there is none about how a lineage should be defined. ‘Species’ are often created or dismissed arbitrarily, according to the individual taxonomist's adherence to one of at least 30 definitions. ”

“ Because there’s no one agreed list of all the world’s species. Competing lists exist for organisms such as mammals and birds, while other less well-known groups have none. And there are more than 30 definitions of what constitutes a species. This can make life difficult for biodiversity researchers and those working in areas such as conservation, biosecurity and regulation of the wildlife trade.
In the past few years, a public debate erupted among global taxonomists, including those who authored and contributed to this article, about whether the rules of taxonomy should be changed. ”