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. 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.Hymenoptera is one of the four largest orders of insects, with about 130,000 described species. In the Fauna Europaea database, ‘Hymenoptera - Apocrita (excluding Ichneumonoidea)’ comprises 13 superfamilies, 52 families, 91 subfamilies, 38 tribes and 13,211 species. The paper includes a complete list of taxa dealt with, the number of species in each and the name of the specialist responsible for data acquisition. As a general conclusion about the European fauna of Hymenoptera, the best known countries in terms of recorded species are those from northwestern Europe, with the least known fauna probably in the more eastern and southeastern parts of Europe.
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
The assessment of biodiversity, monitoring changes, sustainable exploitation of biodiversity, and much legislative work depends upon a validated overview of taxonomic biodiversity, in which Fauna Europaea plays a major role, providing a web-based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level and some additional optional information
Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distribution of all extant, currently known multicellular European land and freshwater animal species assembled by a large network of experts
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 Fauna Europaea data-papers will contribute to a quality assessement on biodiversity data by providing estimates on gaps in taxonomic information and knowledge. Purpose: Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distribution of all extant, currently known multicellular European land and freshwater animal species assembled by a large network of experts.
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