Future Concerns

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Future concerns and possible "programmes".

Written and/or vocal support for the ICZN and/or for ZooBank, both of which suffer from funding problems.

Collaboration with ZooBank, if requested, to advance the validation of details of works, names and nomenclatural acts registered but still awaiting the careful scrutiny needed to allow the community to consider registrations accurate and thus valid.

Projected Database II: the Howard & Moore Checklist exists as a structured database which, in the list pages displayed on this website, appears as discrete taxon-specific lines, it is possible to link each line to a sister database where each taxon has its own titled page within which various lists and tables can be inserted to provide information not in the checklist. Database II is now in the design stage and among it’s sections deveopment priority is being given to synonyms. Every valid name, synonyms included, must be based on a valid description, depiction or indication, and conceptually all names at species-group level have a type or types. The world’s natural history museums are tasked within seeking the types that have not been located and the searching needs to include the many names that are deep in synonymy. Ornithologists do not have the luxury of any Lists of Available Names (LANs) and in this connection there has been no significant work done in the last 30 years except for a work intended to be shaped to become a list of available genus-group names (Bock, 1994). Database II sees the collection and databasing of all such synonyms as a primary goal which logically needs to involve all those who seek to create type catalogues and to seek unlocated types whether in their own museums or elsewhere. Work on Database II is likely to take years of careful work and the database is being designed for use by multiple volunteers, associated with provision of guidance on how to work within the database. Volunteers from the museum community are now invited join the project by sending an e-mail to ecdickinson13@gmail.com

Support for a possible new textbook on avian systematics including explanatory notes on aspects of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (probably the forthcoming 5th. Code. It should include a firm intention to illustrate it with examples from the world of birds, and it should explain many if not most issues in the context of the world’s avifauna. The Trust would need to make of this an Appeal for funds to support the creation and writing of the work, which the Trust itself would not publish. Ideally this should be a work used to teach students and should be created in conjunction with a leading educational publisher with good market access.

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