International agreement takes Catalogue of Life forward There is
no catalogue of the known organisms on Earth - a fact that
surprises many outside the sphere of biodiversity - but a
significant step was taken recently towards producing such an
index when an international agreement was signed to help develop
the Catalogue of Life. Professor Frank Bisby, of the School of
Plant Sciences at the University of Reading, and Dr Michael
Ruggiero in Washington, DC, signed agreements with the
intergovernmental Global Biodiversity Information Facility
(GBIF), based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The partners agreed to use
the developing Catalogue of Life, a comprehensive electronic
index of all known organisms, as the core species index for
GBIF. The Catalogue of Life programme is principally run by
Species 2000, based in Reading, and the North American
Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), based at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The GBIF will enable
scientists and citizens alike to navigate, extract and a