Abstract
Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level (up to the Urals, excluding the Caucasus region), and some additional information. The Fauna Europaea project covers about 230,000 taxonomic names, including 130,000 accepted species and 14,000 accepted subspecies, which is much more than the originally projected number of 100,000 species. This represents a huge effort by more than 400 contributing specialists throughout Europe and is a unique (standard) reference suitable for many users in science, government, industry, nature conservation and education.This paper provides updated information on the taxonomic composition and distribution of the Annelida - terrestrial Oligochaeta (Megadrili and Enchytraeidae), Aphanoneura and Polychaeta, recorded in Europe. Data on 18 families, 11 autochthonous and 7 allochthonous, represented in our continent by a total of 800 species, are reviewed, beginning from their distinctness, phylogenetic status, diversity and global distribution, and following with major recent developments in taxonomic and faunistic research in Europe. A rich list of relevant references is appended. The Fauna Europaea Annelida - terrestrial Oligochaeta data-set, as completed in 2004, will be updated accordingly.
Highlights
The European Commission published the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, providing a framework for development of Community policies and instruments in order to comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity
This Strategy recognises the current incomplete state of knowledge at all levels concerning biodiversity, which is a constraint on the successful implementation of the Convention
Fauna Europaea contributes to this Strategy by supporting one of the main themes: to identify and catalogue the components of European biodiversity into a database in order to serve as a basic tool for science and conservation policies
Summary
The European Commission published the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, providing a framework for development of Community policies and instruments in order to comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity. The assessment of biodiversity, monitoring changes, sustainable exploitation of biodiversity, and much legislative work depend upon a validated overview of taxonomic biodiversity Towards this end Fauna Europaea plays a major role, providing a web-based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level and some additional useful information. After Fifteen years of steady progress, in order to efficiently disseminate the Fauna Europaea results and to increase the acknowledgement of the Fauna Europaea contributors, novel e-Publishing tools have been applied to prepare data-papers of all major taxonomic groups For this purpose a special Biodiversity Data Journal Series has been compiled, called Contributions on Fauna Europaea. Additional information: Introduction to Annelida-terrestrial Oligochaeta, Aphanoneura and Polychaeta
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