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OPEN 3 ACCESS Freely available online © PLOSI o - Global Coordination and Standardisation in Marine Biodiversity through the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and Related Databases Mark J. Costello1"’, Philippe Bouchet2, Geoff Boxshall3, Kristian Fauchald4, Dennis Gordon5, Bert W. Hoeksema6, Gary C. B. Poore7, Rob W. M. van Soest6, Sabine Stöhr8, T. Chad Walter4, Bart Vanhoorne9, Wim Decock9, Ward Appeltans9,109 1 Leigh Marine Laboratory, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, 2 Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France, 3The Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom, 4Smithsonian Institution, Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America, 5 Aquatic Biodiversity & Biosecurity, National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, Wellington, New Zealand, 6 Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, 7 Museum Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 8 Swedish Museum of Natural History; Department of Invertebrate Zoology, Stockholm, Sweden, 9 Flanders Marine Institute, Ostend, Belgium, 10 Intergovernmental Oceanographic Com m ission of UNESCO; IOC Project Office for IODE, O stend, Belgium Abstract The World Register of Marine Species is an over 90% complete open-access inventory of allmarine species names. Here we illustrate the scale of the problems with species names, synonyms, and their classification, and describe how WoRMS publishes online quality assured information on marine species. Within WoRMS, over 100 global, 12 regional and 4 thematic species databases are integrated with a common taxonomy. Over 240 editors from 133 institutions and 31 countries manage the content. To avoid duplication of effort, content is exchanged with 10 external databases. At present WoRMS contains 460,000 taxonomic names (from Kingdom to subspecies), 368,000 species level combinations of which 215,000 are currently accepted marine species names, and 26,000 related but non-marine species.
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