polychaetes.info

What is this website for?

This website is intended as a data-sharing area for anybody who is working on polychaete identification, taxonomy and systematics. At the moment, it is primarily being used by the Polychaete Research Group at the Natural History Museum, but we welcome other interested users to upload their data as well.

One of our central goals is to ensure that the species level taxonomic work that is used in ecological surveys of biodiversity is made available in the public domain. Much of this data has historically been confined to notes held in offices and laboratories. By making it publically available, we believe we will encourage future revisionary taxonomy and enable linkages between polychaete taxonomists, as well as improving the quality-control of our own data. 

By building up a central database of species descriptions and images, we will create a resource that can be used for future revisionary taxonomy, new species descriptions, the setting up of new collaborations, and a basis for future taxonomic workshops. Descriptions posted here are not formal descriptions in any published sense, and do not adhere to the codes of the ICZN. The site is designed to carry both described and previously undescribed (sp. A, B, C etc.) species morphological information.

The data posted to this site is backed up on a daily basis on servers at the Natural History Museum, London, by members of the EDIT team.

Data, images and descriptions posted to this site can be viewed by anybody, but only registered users can post, edit and comment. You can apply for a user account here .

Interested? Read the detailed instructions first.

This site is maintained by Dr Adrian Glover at the Natural History Museum, London.