Catalogue of Life and Freshwater species data

What this was about

Olaf Banki marked 25 years of the public Catalogue of Life (over 2.2 million accepted species) and described ChecklistBank, its API-first infrastructure with around 65,000 data sources, including about 1,000 national lists, 400 invasive species lists and 200 global lists. He admitted CoL cannot currently tell which species are freshwater: WoRMS provides freshwater/marine/brackish/terrestrial flags that CoL holds but cannot model or show, lists like freshwaterecology.info are not yet published there, AlgaeBase is not openly licensed, and FADA's 2013 lists are outdated. He pledged that within about a year CoL will ingest FADAtims data and add freshwater, brackish, water-dependent and aquatic designations to its systems and API, which would flow to GBIF.

Why it matters. Because CoL is GBIF's taxonomic reference, adding habitat designations would solve a 15-year-old problem of analysing freshwater biodiversity from aggregated data.

In the room

• 2026 is the 25th year of public CoL releases; activities began in 1996. The release has slightly more than 2.2 million accepted species.
• CoL now publishes a base release and an extended release adding e.g. Plazi publications, UNITE species hypotheses and Barcode of Life.
• ChecklistBank is an open repository for taxonomic, nomenclatural and policy lists, hosts CoL's assembly tooling and comparison tools; all functionality is in the API.
• About 65,000 data sources in ChecklistBank, growing monthly mostly through publications from Plazi and Pensoft; roughly 1,000 national lists, 400 invasive species lists and 200 global lists.
• CoL cannot yet filter freshwater species in its own product; freshwaterecology.info matches well except phytobenthos but is not published in ChecklistBank.
• WoRMS flags marine/freshwater/brackish/terrestrial but CoL cannot model this in its front end; algae coverage is weak because AlgaeBase is not openly licensed.
• Four FADA lists from the 2013 assessment remain in CoL and have not been updated; about 1,700 datasets mention freshwater in their title, mostly Plazi publications.

Notable moments