Improving taxonomic practices and enhancing its extensibility - an example from araneology

We downloaded nearly all the taxonomic works documented in the WSC during the time period of 2008-2018. Each investigator documented authorship and the number of new species described per publication; our review focused exclusively on newly described taxa during the study time period. Only a few non-English works were omitted from the study for which we were unable to find a translation that allowed confident data scoring. Table 1 below lists the parameters reviewed and how they were scored. Binary scorings were based on interrogative NO/YES (0/1) responses, whereas others were quantitative (documenting absolute numbers of observations or counts). Generally, we assessed the following: 1) what type of data were used to establish species constructs; 2) how species were illustrated; 3) was raw specimen data downloadable; 4) how many specimens were examined for each species; and 5) what sexes were available for each species. The number of specimens available was tabulated as (1), (2), or (&gt;2); &gt;2 is somewhat arbitrary and underestimates the paucity of data associated with some species, but objectively captures the variation in the data set without documenting the absolute number of specimens for all species. A study was classified as ‘integrative’ if morphological data (i.e., genitalic or other) was used in combination with at least one other data source. For species concept, we assessed each paper to determine whether the author stated explicitly what species concept they used to delineate taxa.The data were tabulated in a MS Excel spreadsheet; summary statistics and bar graphs were produced using the base R statistics packages and carried out in R-Studio [29]. <br>