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. For the Mollusca-Bivalvia, data from 5 families (Margaritiferidae, Unionidae, Sphaeriidae, Cyrenidae, Dreissenidae) containing 55 species are included in this paper.European freshwater bivalves belong to the Orders Unionoida and Cardiida. All the European unionoids are included in the superfamily Unionoidea, the freshwater mussels or naiads. The European cardiids belong to the following three superfamilies: Cardioidea, Cyrenoidea and Dreissenoidea. Among the Unionoidea there are the most imperilled animal groups on the planet while the Cardioidea includes the cosmopolitan genus Pisidium, the Cyrenoidea the Asiatic clam (Corbicula fluminea) and the Dreissenoidea the famous invasive zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha). Basic information is summarized on their taxonomy and biology. Tabulations include a complete list of the current estimated families, genera and species.
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. Purpose: The Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distribution of all living, currently known multicellular European land and fresh-water animal species assembled by a large network of experts, using advanced electronic tools for data collations and validation routines. The Fauna Europaea 'Guidelines for Group Coordinators and Taxonomic Specialists', include the standards, protocols, scope, and limits that provide the instructions for all more 400 specialists contributing to the project, strictly following the provisions of the current edition of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. For preparing the Mollusca-Bivalvia data set additional support was received from the Fauna Ibérica Project (Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales-C.S.I.C)
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