October 16, 2023 / by Olaf Bánki

Monthly Release October 2023

Permanent identifier: https://doi.org/10.48580/df7lv

Catalogue of Life (COL) is an assembly of expert-based global species checklists with the aim to build a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth. As a global consortium, we aim to address the needs of researchers, policy-makers, environmental managers and the wider public for a consistent and up-to-date listing of all the world’s known species. We are happy to announce that we have just published the COL Checklist October 2023 online!

The COL Checklist is now issued with a CC-BY license! The COL Checklist contains over 2,1 million accepted species. About 1.98 million are living species, and the rest are extinct. A large community of taxonomists, over 500 experts globally, representing 164 data sources is underpinning this global species list. Although the COL Checklist aspires to cover all described extant species, there are still deficiencies for particular taxonomic groups.

A detailed list of source changes can be found in ChecklistBank where you can also view changes between other releases.

Temporary identifiers - Warning!

After publishing the release, Jorrit Poelen notified us that there are changes in COL identifiers for common species like Panthera leo found on Wikidata. Investigations then revealed 1.244.280 wrong identifiers being used for name usages in this release!

Please do not store any of these temporary identifiers as they will be removed from the next release when we will revert back to the previous identifiers. You can identify temporary IDs by their length. True COL identifiers only have a length of 3-6 alphanumeric upper case characters, e.g. 4CGXP. The temporary ones either are UUIDs with 36 characters like 800a45f8-6c31-4ce7-926f-78e71478f179 or are made up of 19-22 alphanumerical characters in a more condensed form, e.g. 2WCzPyn85NO4BdYFo8RJ.

The names themselves and other data in the release are fine and have not been corrupted. See github for more details and our name-ids and stable-ids posts for more information about stable COL identifiers.

What’s new in the October edition?

77 checklists updated:

• 3i Auchenorrhyncha
• PaleBioDB
• Entiminae
• Gelechiidae
• GLI (Lepidoptera)
• ITIS
• Pterophoroidea
• SF Isoptera
• WCO (Opiliones)
• WOL (Odonata)
• World Ferns
• World Plants
• WoRMS, 65 checklists

Other changes:

• Eumycetozoa.com of Jan 2023 re-synced