World Spider Catalog

World Spider Catalog
Type of site
 Database
Available in English
Owner Naturhistorisches Museum der Burgergemeinde Bern (Natural History Museum of Bern)
Website www.wsc.nmbe.ch
Launched July 2000 (text pages)
January 2015 (database)
Current status 18.0

The World Spider Catalog (WSC) is an online searchable database concerned with spider taxonomy. It aims to list all accepted families, genera and species, as well as provide access to the related taxonomic literature. The WSC began as a series of individual web pages in 2000, created by Norman I. Platnick of the American Museum of Natural History. After Platnick's retirement in 2014, the Natural History Museum of Bern (Switzerland) took over the catalog, converting it to a relational database.[1]

As of October 2017, 46,932 accepted species were listed.[2]

The order Araneae (spiders) is the seventh-largest of all orders in terms of numbers of species. The existence of the World Spider Catalog makes spiders the largest taxon with an online listing that is updated regularly. It has been described as an "exhaustive resource" that has "promoted rigorous scholarship and amplified productivity" in the taxonomy of spiders.[3]

References

  1. ↑ "Introduction", World Spider Catalog, Natural History Museum Bern, retrieved 2015-09-29
  2. ↑ "Welcome page", World Spider Catalog, Natural History Museum Bern, retrieved 2017-10-19
  3. ↑ Miller, J.A.; Agosti, D.; Penev, L.; Sautter, G.; Georgiev, T.; Catapano, T.; Patterson, D.; King, D.; Pereira, S.; Vos, R.A. & Sierra, S. (2015), "Integrating and visualizing primary data from prospective and legacy taxonomic literature", Biodiversity Data Journal, 3, e5063, doi:10.3897/BDJ.3.e5063 , p. 3
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