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]

World Spider Catalog
Type of site
Database
Available inEnglish
OwnerNaturhistorisches Museum der Burgergemeinde Bern (Natural History Museum of Bern)
URLwww.wsc.nmbe.ch
LaunchedJune 2000 (text pages)
January 2015 (database)
Current status24.5

As of June 2022, 50,151 accepted species were listed. By October 25, 2023 this number had increased to 51,548 for an average of rate of discovery being 3 new species per day.[2]

The order Araneae (spiders) has the seventh-most species of all orders. 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 edit

  1. ^ "Introduction", World Spider Catalog, Natural History Museum Bern, retrieved 2019-12-30
  2. ^ "Welcome page", World Spider Catalog, Natural History Museum Bern, retrieved 2022-06-12
  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 (3): e5063, doi:10.3897/BDJ.3.e5063, PMC 4442254, PMID 26023286

External links edit