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.Helminths parasitic in animals represent a large assemblage of worms, representing three phyla, with more than 200 families and almost 4,000 species of parasites from all major vertebrate and many invertebrate groups. A general introduction is given for each of the major groups of parasitic worms, i.e. the Acanthocephala, Monogenea, Trematoda (Aspidogastrea and Digenea), Cestoda and Nematoda. Basic information for each group includes its size, host-range, distribution, morphological features, life-cycle, classification, identification and recent key-works. Tabulations include a complete list of families dealt with, the number of species in each and the name of the specialist responsible for data acquisition, a list of additional specialists who helped with particular groups, and a list of higher taxa dealt with down to the family level. A compilation of useful references is appended.

Highlights

  • The European Commission published the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, providing a framework for the development of Community policies and instruments in order to comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity

  • The 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

  • The Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distribution of all living, currently known multicellular European land and freshwater animal species assembled by a large network of experts using advanced electronic tools for data collation and validation routines

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Summary

Introduction

The European Commission published the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, providing a framework for the development of Community policies and instruments in order to comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity. Basic information for each group includes its size, host-range, distribution, morphological features, life-cycle, classification, identification and recent key-works. The 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.

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