IRMNG - Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera

The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG) is a provisional (or ‘interim’) compilation of genus names – including species names in many cases – and covers both living and extinct biota into a single system to support taxonomic and other queries dealing with e.g. homonyms, authorities, parent-child relationships, spelling variations and distinctions between marine and non-marine or fossil and recent taxa.

Taxonomic names in IRMNG are assigned flags to distinguish between marine vs. non-marine, and extant vs. fossil status; they are also arranged into a simple management hierarchy for navigation purposes, compilation of statistics per taxonomic group and more. Fuzzy matching is also supported (using "Taxamatch") so that a misspelled name can in most instances be reconciled to a correctly spelled name at genus or species rank, where this is held.

IRMNG was a project of OBIS Australia designed to assist in the provision of marine species data to OBIS, by permitting the discrimination of marine from nonmarine (and extant from fossil) species records on the basis of the genus name portion of their scientific name (normally, genus + species, or genus + species + infraspecies if applicable). The aim of the project is to (a) assemble as complete a list as possible of the estimated 150,000 extant and 50,000 fossil generic names in current use, plus their possible further 250,000-300,000 synonyms, and (b) flag as many of these as is possible with their marine/nonmarine, and extant/fossil, status. Relevant species lists are also being attached to the "correct" instances of genus names as available.

IRMNG was developed and based at CSIRO, Australia from 2006-2014, and from 2016 onwards it is now hosted at VLIZ, Belgium: http://www.irmng.org/