EDIT Insects

The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) is a five-year, EU-funded Network of Excellence, the purpose of which is to encourage better integration of effort in taxonomy across Europe. It has long been felt that support for taxonomy will be much improved if taxonomists can unify their effort and ‘work as one’. That is a demanding aim, but we can at least try to move towards it.

EDIT is led by the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, and is formed of a consortium of many European institutions. The project is divided into a number of ‘Workpackages’, one of which (WP6) is dedicated to ‘Unifying revisionary taxonomy’. The Diptera have been selected as demonstrator taxa for this Workpackage. The project provides an ideal opportunity to consider working together more effectively. We should like to build on the goodwill that exists between entomologists (professional and amateur) in the hope of furthering the aims of EDIT, of taxonomy, and, particularly, of dipterology.

Currently we are testing the Diptera portal as well as the Scratchpads, both of which deliver nomenclatural and taxonomic data as well as images. The portals have been developed by our IT partners (WP5), the Scratchpads by WP6 .