Taxonomy
As Birds of the World inches towards the close of our fourth year (!), we have much good news to report about how the project has developed, expanded, and adapted to new opportunities. Please read on for details!
Three avian taxonomy experts from eBird and Birds of the World convened for a discussion of the recent updates to the eBird/Clements checklist. The team provided an in-depth overview of the 2023 taxonomy updates and recent efforts to standardize bird taxonomy across all major global checklists.
Once per year, eBird updates all bird records in the database to reflect the latest ‘splits’, ‘lumps’, additions of new species, changes to scientific names, taxonomic sequence, and more. As well, our Birds of the World editorial team furiously produces, splits, and lumps species accounts to reflect the latest nomenclature.
Why is each species named what it is? And what do these names reveal about the birds themselves?
Over the next few weeks, the 2021 eBird Clements taxonomic update will progress. This update, our first since the launch of the Birds of the World website, takes into account recent taxonomic knowledge on splits, lumps, name changes, and changes in the sequence of the species lists.
A new species of Melanocharis berrypecker (Melanocharitidae) was discovered during a recent ornithological expedition to the Kumawa Mountains in West Papua, in the cloud forest at an elevation of 1200 m. It has been named Satin Berrypecker (Melanocharis citreola)
Birds of the World just released the new Taxonomy Explorer, a feature that checks two big items off our collective wish list: regional filters and visual family index. The tool provides limitless exploration of Birds of the World and will be extremely helpful for research, birding, and teaching about birds.
Waterfowl taxonomy is notoriously challenging, in part owing to morphological similarities between and within groups that can obscure patterns of divergence (Mowbray et al. 2020).
Neotropical ornithologist Tom Schulenberg recounts his first sighting of a Scytalopus tapaculo in southern Peru and discusses a long-term, collaborative project to resolve the phylogeny of the tapaculos: that is, to determine how the ever-expanding roster of tapaculos are related to each other
One of the most exciting features in Birds of the World is the new Bird Families of the World Explorer, which provides visual and interactive overviews of all 249 bird families along with in-depth summaries of recent scientific literature of the relationships of each family.
