World Register of Marine Species

Abbreviation	WoRMS
Formation	2008
Headquarters	Ostend, Belgium
Coordinates	51°13′40.25″N 2°56′28.07″E / 51.2278472°N 2.9411306°E / 51.2278472; 2.9411306
Website	marinespecies.org

The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is a database that aims to provide an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms.^[1]

Contents[edit]

The content of the registry is edited and maintained by scientific specialists on each group of organism. These taxonomists control the quality of the information, which is gathered from malacological journals and several regional and taxon-specific databases. WoRMS maintains valid names of all marine organisms, but also provides information on synonyms and invalid names. It will be an ongoing task to maintain the registry, as new species are constantly being discovered and described by scientists. In addition, the nomenclature and taxonomy of existing species is often corrected or changed as new research is constantly being published.

History[edit]

WoRMS was founded in 2008 and grew out of the European Register of Marine Species and the UNESCO-IOC Register of Marine Organisms (URMO), which was compiled by Jacob van der Land (and several colleagues) at the National Museum of Natural History, Leiden ^[2] It is primarily funded by the European Union and hosted by the Flanders Marine Institute in Ostend, Belgium. WoRMS has established formal agreements with several other biodiversity projects, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Encyclopedia of Life. In 2008, WoRMS stated that it hoped to have an up-to-date record of all marine species completed by 2010, the year in which the Census of Marine Life was completed.^[3]

As of February 2018, WoRMS contained listings for 480,931 marine species names (including synonyms) of which 240,633 are valid marine species (95 % checked). Their goal is to have a listing for each of the approximately more than 240,000 marine species.^[4][5]

See also[edit]

• 
  Census of Marine Life (CoML)


• 
  Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS)


• Catalog of Fishes


• AlgaeBase

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• World Register of Marine Species


• 
  Horton, Tammy; Gofas, Serge; Kroh, Andreas; Poore, Gary C. B.; Read, Geoffrey; Rosenberg, Gary; Stöhr, Sabine; Bailly, Nicolas; Boury-Esnault, Nicole (2017-12-28). "Improving nomenclatural consistency: a decade of experience in the World Register of Marine Species". European Journal of Taxonomy. 0 (389). doi:10.5852/ejt.2017.389. ISSN 2118-9773. 
  


• Leen Vandepitte, Bart Vanhoorne, Wim Decock, Sofie Vranken, Thomas Lanssens, Stefanie Dekeyzer, Kevin Verfaille, Tammy Horton, Andreas Kroh, Francisco Hernandez, Jan Mees; Celebrating the 10-year anniversary of WoRMS with another publication: general insights and experiences from the DMT PLOS One April 6, 2018