Fauna Europaea: Hymenoptera - Symphyta & Ichneumonoidea.

Kees Van Achterberg,Andreas Taeger,Dicky Sick Ki Yu,Stephan M Blank,Matti Viitasaari,Kees Zwakhals,Yde De Jong

doi:10.3897/bdj.5.e14650

Abstract

Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all extant European terrestrial and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at the level of countries and major islands (west of the Urals and excluding the Caucasus region), and some additional information. The Fauna Europaea project comprises 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. Fauna Europaea 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.For the Hymenoptera, taxonomic data from one grade (Symphyta) and one Superfamily (Ichneumonoidea), including 15 families and 10,717 species, are included.Ichneumonoidea is the largest superfamily of Hymenoptera and consisting of two extant families, Ichneumonidae and Braconidae. The costal cell of the fore wing is absent, the fore wing has at least two closed cells, the constriction between the mesosoma (thorax + first abdominal segment or propodeum) and the metasoma (remainder of abdomen) is distinct and the parasitoid larvae usually spin a silken cocoon. Also, the metasoma is ventrally partly desclerotized in the vast majority of ichneumonoids.

Highlights

In 1998 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
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 to serve as a basic tool for science and conservation policies
The assessment of biodiversity, monitoring changes, sustainable exploitation of biodiversity, as well as much legislative work depends upon a validated taxonomic overview, in which Fauna Europaea plays a major role by providing a web-based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at the level of countries and some relevant optional information

Summary

Introduction

In 1998 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. Purpose: Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distributions (at national or in some cases regional level) of all currently known extant multicellular European terrestrial and freshwater animal species. The Hymenoptera (Symphyta & Ichneumonidae) is one of the 58 Fauna Europaea major taxonomic groups, covering 10,717 species (Fig. 1).

Results

Conclusion