COL

A more comprehensive Catalogue of Life now Live!

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that a new version of the Catalogue of Life, containing additional information and data sources is now live on our website!

The mission of Catalogue of Life is to forge a global community that manages an authoritative catalogue of species, through an infrastructure that supports open data publishing and use. The Catalogue of Life is currently assembled from around 17500 instead of from 168 data sources originally. These data sources integrate data from global, regional, national, and management checklists, as well as from digitized literature. Through this, the Catalogue of Life is extended with missing scientific names, authorships, references, vernacular names, and some higher classification. Also molecular taxonomic data, such as Barcode Index Numbers and DNA-based Species Hypotheses are included. All this data is geared towards closing global taxonomic data gaps, and improving the usability. The Catalogue of Life is now suited to taxonomically represent the more than 3,5 billion species occurrences mediated through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Throughout 2025, we held several public reviews and, thanks to the valuable feedback received, refined data sources selection and criteria. Many improvements have already been implemented, and further enhancements are underway to make Catalogue of Life more comprehensive, reliable, and user-friendly. We sincerely thank everyone who contributed to this effort so far. We look forward to even broader community participation. Catalogue of Life’s flexible design enables continuous updates and timely responses to any new issues that may arise.

Key website updates

The Catalogue of Life includes information with different gradients of quality. It now comprises two releases. The base release is verified by taxonomic experts specifically for COL. The eXtended Release includes extra data from other sources. The latter is now the default in catalogueoflife.org.

Browse view: Shows the COL eXtended Release merged names marked with the XR icon. Thus you can identify which names come from vetted sources and which from the additional sources (regional, national, and management checklists among others).

Search page: You can distinguish and filter between the Base and the eXtended releases.

Downloads: Choose the release that best fits your needs.

Source list: Includes the new data providers contributing to the eXtended Release.
Improved navigation: Updated menu and new informational sections.

Explore the live release here: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/

Catalogue of Life 2025

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Catalogue of Life continues its mission in building the most comprehensive and authoritative list of all known species on Earth. This should serve as an essential foundation for biodiversity research, conservation, and policy. With contributions from hundreds of taxonomic experts worldwide, the Catalogue of Life 2025 includes over 2.2 million extant species. While gaps remain in some groups, this year the total number of names in the Catalogue has grown by 2%, with 48,766 newly accepted species names added.

What’s New in the 2025 catalogue?

During 2025 several global catalogs started collaborating with us. The insects are one of the key groups expanded in the Catalogue of Life 2025, in addition to Archaea, Bacteria, and crustaceans:

AntCat – covering ants, one of the most ecologically dominant insects, essential for soil health, and ecosystem engineering.
P. Bouchard’s 2024 classification – a major update to beetle taxonomy management, providing a modern framework for one of the planet’s most diverse and vital groups.
Háva’s Catalogue – global coverage for selected beetle families, beginning with Derodontidae for this release and will expand to more taxa in the coming releases.
ITIS – expanded its coverage by adding the ladybird or ladybugs beetles (Coccinellidae) list, insects well known for their role as natural pest controllers in agriculture.
Species Files Permopsocida – global checklist for a little-known insect order related to barklice, offering insight into an ancient lineage of plant-feeding insects.
WoRMS Mysidacea – adding information for three crustacean orders (Lophogastrida, Stygiomysida and Mysida), crucial links in aquatic food webs from plankton to fish and seabirds.
LPSN Prokaryotic Nomenclature Up-to-Date – covering Archaea and Bacteria, key drivers of nutrient cycling and foundational to all ecosystems.

In addition, 113 existing taxonomic data sources were updated during this yearly cycle. These reflect the latest taxonomic research and expert curation across a wide range of organisms – from weevils and moths to scorpions, fishes, ferns, and marine species. Check the full details of the updated taxonomic data sources at: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/data/metadata This Catalogue of Life 2025 is published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. It promotes open access and maximum reuse in biodiversity research, conservation, and policy. And, it aligns with global open science efforts and supports the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s call for accessible biodiversity data to help halt and reverse nature loss. The 2025 catalogue is openly available at: https://doi.org/10.48580/dgr6n, please use the DOI to give credit to all COL’s contributors.

Biodiversity Heritage Library's Call for Support & integration with COL

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Call for Support

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open-access digital library of biodiversity literature and archives. BHL plays a vital role in the development of Catalogue of Life (COL) because COL data contributors heavily rely on BHL to conduct the scientific research needed to build taxonomic and nomenclatural databases. BHL is currently seeking new partners to support and sustain this essential infrastructure following the Smithsonian Institution’s decision to conclude its 20 year role as BHL’s host on January 1, 2026. Finding new partners to sustain BHL’s future is extremely important. Please help share BHL’s Call for Support widely.

Integrating BHL with COL

It is important for taxonomists, policy makers and the general public to be able to quickly access nomenclatural acts and original descriptions for taxa for purposes of identification of organisms, to assess taxonomic validity, understand the historical context of taxonomic concepts, to resolve ambiguities, and to cite the original literature (among many other use cases). The BHLnames project was established to help directly link scientific names to their original description page in BHL (Mozzherin & Ower, 2020; Ower & Mozzherin, 2021). Several algorithms were developed to automatically score scientific name occurrences in BHL on the likelihood that they are the original description of a taxon. Matches are assessed using normalized scientific name annotations (e.g., sp. nov., comb. nov., subsp. nov.), journal title abbreviations, years, volumes, and page numbers. 3000 matches were manually scored as correct or incorrect links, which was used as a training dataset for Bayesian scoring.

A new BHL dataset (BHL Staff and Community, 2025) was recently published in ChecklistBank with the aim of supplementing COL extended releases (xRelease) with direct links and references to taxon original descriptions in BHL. The dataset contains scientific names with at least an 80% probability of being the original description and presently includes 538,288 names with BHL links (~10% of scientific names in COL). These scientific names are included in the dataset with the COL nameUsageID as the name ID, a direct link to the BHL page, the BHL page as an alternative identifier (e.g., bhl:page:39205667), and a reference record. The reference records were created using BHL metadata from either “items” (bound works such as books or journals) or preferably “parts” (journal articles or chapters within a bound work). Part metadata (Table 1) has been contributed by a wide range of BHL institutional partners, and the BioStor project which helps extract scientific articles within BHL items (Page, 2011). In coming weeks, COL aims to merge these BHL direct links and references into the COL xReleases.

To make the BHL dataset itself more browseable, we included the COL classification for taxa with BHL original description matches. The COL classification will likely conflict with the taxonomic classification in the original literature because taxonomy changes over time with increased knowledge.

Somewhat frequently, the BHL links may be to the table of contents or index of the book or journal in which a species was described. This happens because it might be the first name occurrence within the item that had the full scientific name with sp. nov. (e.g., it appeared in the table of contents first), the image of text on the page could have been distorted leading to bad OCR transcription of the actual description, or sometimes the scientific names are abbreviated which makes them significantly harder to detect with GNfinder/GNverifier (Mozzherin, 2024). We will soon add a feedback system that will allow users to help correct these problems and also contribute new direct links to pages that the BHLnames tool missed. For now you may open an issue in the BHLnames GitHub repository if you find a link that needs to be corrected. BHL is also continuously adding new digitized materials, part and item metadata which over time will increase the number of original description matches.

References

BHL Staff and Community. 2025. Biodiversity Heritage Library (0.0.1). https://www.checklistbank.org/dataset/310770

Mozzherin, D. 2024. GNfinder -- a finder of scientific names in a variety of media. (Version v1.1.5) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10070488

Mozzherin, D.; Ower, G. 2020. Adding Taxonomic Dimensions to the Scientific Names Index in the Biodiversity Heritage Library via Integration with the Catalogue of Life. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59130. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59130

Mozzherin, D.; Ower, G. 2024. SQLite: A “Frictionless” Solution for Exchange of Biodiversity Data? Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 8: e138931. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.8.138931

Ower, G.; Mozzherin, D. 2021. Algorithms for connecting scientific names with literature in the Biodiversity Heritage Library via the Global Names Project and Catalogue of Life. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 5: e74114. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.5.74114

Page, R.D. 2011. Extracting scientific articles from a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BMC Bioinformatics 12: 187. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-12-187

COL DOIs & ORCIDs

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Catalogue of Life issues a distinct DOI for every release which embeds a lot of metadata. For example doi:10.48580/dg9ld for the Annual Edition 2024. Notably this includes all authors of all sources COL has made use of as authors of the release itself. If the metadata of the sources contains also your personal ORCID, your ORCID is copied into the DOI metadata. In that case it is possible to automatically push COL releases as works to your ORCID profile.

COL uses DataCite as it’s DOI registration agency. In order to automatically push works, DataCite first needs once your personal authorisation. If you are interested in this service, we recommend to follow the ORCID guidlines.

Meet the Libroscope

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Catalogue of Life is amongst the first signatories dedicated to fully leveraging biodiversity knowledge from research publications within an open science framework by 2035.

Some of the world’s leading institutions, experts and scientific infrastructures relating to biodiversity information are uniting around a new 10-year roadmap to ‘liberate’ data presently trapped in research publications.

The initiative aims to enable the creation of a ‘Libroscope’ - a mechanism for unlocking and linking data from scientific literature to support understanding of biodiversity, as the microscope and telescope previously revolutionized science. The plan largely builds on existing technology and workflows, and does not rely on construction of a new technical infrastructure.

Olaf Bánki, Executive Director of the Catalogue of Life, commented: “We call out to the scientific community, especially the younger generation, to join our effort in unlocking biodiversity data from literature. Actionable biodiversity and taxonomic data from digitized literature contributes to creating an index of all described organisms of all life on earth. We need such data to tackle and understand the current biodiversity crisis.”

Liberating and linking data from such publications - estimated to encompass more than 500 million total pages - would represent a compelling mission for the next decade. Achieving this mission will support further research, and understanding of biodiversity vital to meeting global goals and targets such as the [Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework(]https://www.cbd.int/gbf) (KMGBF), as well as assisting the compiling of knowledge assessments such as those carried out by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

A roadmap for staged action over the next decade was agreed between initial signatories with the following vision: “By 2035, the power of biodiversity knowledge from research publications will be fully leveraged within an open science framework, including unencumbered data discovery, access, and re-use across scientific disciplines and policy applications.”

The Disentis Roadmap has already been signed by 26 institutions and a further 46 individual experts on five continents - among them major natural history collections such as Meise Botanic Garden, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Catalogue of Life, LifeWatch ERIC and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB); journal publishers such as Pensoft Publishers and the European Journal of Taxonomy; research institutions such as Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research; and networks such as TDWG Biodiversity Information Standards and Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF). See the full list of signatories here.

Donat Agosti of the Swiss organization Plazi, who convened the initail consortium for the Disentis roadmap, commented: “We finally have a chance to make a quantum leap in understanding and monitoring biodiversity, by leveraging the power of digital technologies, and combining modern genomic methods with the vast amount of research data published daily and currently stuck in the publication prison. The ‘Libroscope’ will help to explore the universe of existing knowledge, accumulated over hundreds of years, and bring it to the forefront of developments in the digital age, helping nature and people across the globe.”

The roadmap remains open for further signatures, ahead of the launch of an action plan at the Living Data conference in Bogotá, Colombia in October 2025. The original signatories hope that a much broader group of institutions and individuals, across global regions and disciplines, will join the initiative and help to shape implementation of its vision. Engagement of funders will also be critical to realize its objectives.

The specific goals of the roadmap are that by 2035:

All major public biodiversity research funders and academic publishers will encourage and enable publication of data adhering to the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable);
Biodiversity-focussed publications will be accessible in machine-actionable formats, with all non-copyrightable parts of articles flowing into public data repositories;
Published research on biodiversity will be ‘fully AI-ready’, that is openly available for AI training and properly labelled for ingestion by machine-learning modelled, within appropriate ethical and legal frameworks;
Dedicated funding from research and infrastructure grants will be reserved for ensuring access to biodiversity data and knowledge.

The first data manager of the Catalogue of Life

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Catalogue of Life Consortium mourns the tragic loss of Monalisa Cachuela-Palacio, who passed away on 13th October 2024. She was a wonderful person, a highly professional colleague and our nice friend. Mona was in our team at the very beginning of the Catalogue of Life.

The image is showing Mona visiting the Catalogue of Life office at the University of Reading (Reading, UK), on the 9th of November 2004 (seated Frank Bisby, Monalisa Cachuela-Palacio; standing Yury Roskov, Susanah Kimani, Pamela Harling).

Monalisa joined the Species 2000 project in 2001 as the Catalogue of Life data manager, working at the WorldFish Center Philippine Office in Los Baños. She pioneered the new field of biodiversity informatics by creating the Catalogue database from a variety of taxonomic data sets. Monalisa assembled the first five Annual Checklists from the 2nd edition in 2002 to the 5th edition in 2006 of the Catalogue of Life. Under her data management, the Catalogue grew from 242,269 accepted species to 884,552 species. Mona left Catalogue of Life in 2006 to undertake a fellowship in New Zealand.

Monalisa has summed up her experience of the Catalogue assembly nicely in the paper Towards an index of all known species: the Catalogue of Life, its rationale, design and use. Integrative Zoology, 2006, 1(1): 18-21.

We will all keep Mona’s sweet smile in our hearts.

Annual Release 2024

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Permanent identifier: https://doi.org/10.48580/dg9ld

Catalogue of Life (COL) is an assembly of expert-based global species checklists with the aim to build a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth. As a global consortium, we aim to address the needs of researchers, policy-makers, environmental managers and the wider public for a consistent and up-to-date listing of all the world’s known species. We are happy to announce that we have just published the Catalogue of Life 2024 online!

The Catalogue of Life contains about 2,17 million accepted species. About 2,03 million are living species, and the rest are extinct. A large community of taxonomists, over 500 experts globally, representing 164 data sources is underpinning this global species list. Although the COL aspires to cover all described extant species, there are still deficiencies for particular taxonomic groups.

A detailed list of source changes can be found in ChecklistBank where you can also view changes between other releases.

What’s new in the 2024 edition?

new global checklists:

Geometridae (Lepidoptera) replaced family Geometridae from GLI (with 3 updates)
Hepialidae (Lepidoptera) replaced family Hepialidae from GLI (with 2 updates)
ITIS new global checklists for mite infraorder Labidostommatina & superfamilies Anystoidea, Caeculoidea, Paratydeoidea, Raphignathoidea, decapod infraorders Axiidea & Gebiidea, arachnid superfamily Eupodoidea, clam shrimp order Diplostraca (except cladoceran families from FADA Cladocera), and beetle families Haliplidae & Noteridae.
Pinopsida from WFO Plant List replaced Conifer Database
RWS: Rotifer World Catalogue replaced FADA Rotifera
World Plants have replaced Annonaceae, Droseraceae & Brassicaceae families previously taken from the AnnonBase, from the Droseraceae Database & from the Update on the Brassicaceae Species Checklist (2021-08-31)

111 checklists have been updated in a year cycle:

3i Auchenorrhyncha (12 updates)
Alucitoidea (3 updates)
Bryonames (3 updates)
CunaxidBase
Entiminae (12 updates)
Eumycetozoa.com
Gelechiidae (9 updates)
GLI (Lepidoptera, 12 updates)
Global Gracillariidae
ICTV
ITIS (8 updates)
LWS fleas
Pterophoroidea (4 updates)
ReptileDB
RJB Geranium
Scarabs (11 updates)
Sesiidae (4 updates)
SF Aphid (3 updates)
SF Chrysididae (4 updates)
SF Coleorrhyncha
SF Coreoidea (4 updates)
SF Dermaptera (6 updates)
SF Embioptera (6 updates)
SF Grylloblattodea
SF Isoptera (12 updates)
SF Lygaeoidea (3 updates)
SF Mantodea (4 updates)
SF Mantophasmatodea
SF Orthoptera (8 updates)
SF Phasmida (4 updates)
SF Plecoptera (6 updates)
SF Psocodea (6 updates)
SF Zoraptera
Species Fungorum Plus
Systema Dipteroru (3 updates)
The Scorpion Files
TITAN (3 updates)
UCD
WCO (12 updates)
WCVP
WCVP-Fabaceae
WOL (12 updates)
World Ferns (7 updates)
World Plants (7 updates)
WoRMS, 65 checklists (12 updates)
WSC
WWW

GBIF to serve as administrative host for Species 2000 Secretariat

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The GBIF Secretariat and Species 2000 have signed an agreement for GBIF to serve as the host for the Species 2000 Secretariat starting on 1 January 2024. The agreement will strengthen their collaboration on both the Catalogue of Life (COL) and ChecklistBank, while both COL and GBIF will remain independent organizations with their own missions, governance and identities.

The complementary missions of COL and GBIF are reflected in more than two decades of collaboration between the organizations. The Global Biodata Coalition has recognized both infrastructures as Global Core Biodata Resources. The partners have worked together to build ChecklistBank as a joint infrastructure for managing and delivering taxonomic data, which GBIF has hosted alongside the latest version of the Catalogue of Life website since December 2020.

Along with providing administrative support for Species 2000 for two years, GBIF will work with COL to secure funding for the core operations of its distributed Secretariat. At its most recent governing board meeting in October, GBIF announced initial contributions into a Special Purpose Fund supporting collaboration with COL on ChecklistBank from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History / Integrated Taxonomic Information Service (ITIS), the World Bank, and the Netherlands / Stichting ter Bevordering van Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (SNBO).

“Deepening the collaboration between Catalogue of Life and GBIF aligns with our vision of providing consistent, comprehensive taxonomic information needed to harmonize biodiversity data for scientific and policy uses across all sectors,” said Peter Schalk, chair of the Species 2000 Board of Directors, who also served from 2013 to 2017 as chair of the GBIF Governing Board. “We are pleased with COL executive secretary Olaf Bánki‘s efforts to secure this agreement with GBIF and look forward to his continued leadership.”

“The Catalogue of Life is the most professional and reliable source of global taxonomic data on biodiversity, and GBIF is a powerful worldwide network for big data on species distribution and beyond,” said Keping Ma, professor of plant ecology at the Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) and board member of Species 2000. “The combined efforts of these partners will create even greater impact and influence on the field of biodiversity informatics, and I look forward to the bright future of their collective initiative.”

ChecklistBank serves as core infrastructure for both COL and GBIF and evolved from GBIF’s internal “checklistbank” system for managing checklist datasets. GBIF developers have fully rewritten the new public-facing service into an open-access, enterprise-scale publishing platform and data repository for managing all the constituent sources of scientific names and taxonomy that go into the Catalogue of Life.

Development efforts are currently focused on preparing the first production release of an “extended” Catalogue of Life capable of replacing the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy later this year. As outlined in its current work programme, GBIF will begin work this year toward retiring the internal “checklistbank” database and replacing it with ChecklistBank. Upon fulfilling these first two use cases, GBIF and COL will turn their focus to refinements enabling other initiatives to use ChecklistBank, which may lead to additional needs and opportunities for cooperation.

“Our collaboration with Catalogue of Life remains critically important for delivering on the original vision of GBIF and enabling users to navigate and put to use vast quantities of biodiversity information,” said Joe Miller, GBIF’s executive secretary. “Our work to date on ChecklistBank is an important step toward making it much easier for GBIF nodes and our wider community to prepare and share more nationally and thematically relevant checklist datasets.”

Catalogue of Life recognised as a Global Core Biodata Resource

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Catalogue of Life is a collaboration and data resource with the aim for a consistent and up-to-date listing of all the world’s known species. It’s been in existence for over 27 years. At present 2,1 million described species are covered. A global community of more than 500 taxonomic experts is involved. The Catalogue of Life infrastructure, ChecklistBank, contains close to 50k openly accessible taxonomic datasets. It also offers tooling for comparing taxonomic datasets and for building species lists.

The designation of Catalogue of Life as a crucial Global Core Biodata Resource is a recognition that the efforts to catalogue all described organisms by taxonomic experts worldwide are being seen and valued. Most of the world’s biodiversity data is validated through this work. Quality of data is essential for informed decision making and promoting the best possible science, states Olaf Bánki, Executive Secretary of Catalogue of Life.

A global index of all described organisms, covering all life on earth, is an essential datasource for science. Scientists are able to validate research data taxonomically, and biodiversity data infrastructures, like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, also a Global Core Biodata Resource, can provide access and discovery to species information by using Catalogue of Life. Uses of the Catalogue of Life go beyond science into a variety of domains, like health, legislation, border security, nature management, forestry, fisheries and agriculture. Also for the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity trusted baseline information on species is required.

Getting towards a complete global list of described organisms is still a challenge. Most efforts by taxonomic experts are done on a voluntary basis. Large parts of the required information like type specimens where species descriptions are based upon or literature with published descriptions, are still locked up in silo’s; remain undigitized. In addition, the same organisms have been described numerous times, resulting in multiple scientific names for the same organism, which need to be sorted out. Much more effort is required to scale up the global activity around the Catalogue of Life. Without proper species validation, large biodiversity data streams remain untrustworthy, potentially driving the wrong conclusions.

Through its Global Core Biodata Resource designation, the Global Biodata Coalition seeks to draw the attention of life science funders to the most critical of the global set of biodata resources and to better understand the challenges and needs for biodata resource long-term sustainability. The GCBRs are deposition databases and knowledge bases of fundamental importance to the global life sciences and biomedical research communities, providing open access and long-term preservation of key biological data. Sustained, long-term support for these databases is paramount, as their discontinuation would have a highly detrimental impact on the global research endeavour.

Catalogue of life congratulates all the experts involved who contribute to the global species data resource, as well as key partners in getting data prepared, such as the World Register of Marine Species, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System, TaxonWorks/Species Files, the World Flora Online, the Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment, Plazi, Zoobank, IPNI and many others. A special congratulations to LPSN -List of Prokaryotic names with Standing in Nomenclature , who also received the recognition as a Global Core Biodata Resource.

We thank all the funders in the period 2018 to 2023 for their support in making the Catalogue of Life endeavor possible. These include: the European Commission, Naturalis Biodiversity Center / Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility, University of Illinois / Species Files, Chinese Academy of Sciences / Biodiversity Committee, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, Netherlands, Smithsonian Institution / Integrated Taxonomic Information System, Species 2000, Stichting ter Bevordering van Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek.

Annual Release 2023

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Permanent identifier: https://doi.org/10.48580/dfsr

The Catalogue of Life 2023 is now issued with a CC-BY license! The Catalogue of Life 2023 contains over 2,1 million accepted species. About 1.98 million are living species, and the rest are extinct. A large community of taxonomists, over 500 experts globally, representing 164 data sources is underpinning this global species list. Annual releases have long term support and will not be removed, so they continue to be accessible via the API and website of ChecklistBank.

A detailed list of source changes can be found in ChecklistBank where you can also view changes between other releases.

The Catalogue of Life 2023 is dedicated to the memory of David Remsen.

What’s new in 2023 edition?

New global checklists:

Bryonames: Bryophyte Nomenclator as a successor to MOST & ELPT in the Catalogue of Life
ITIS: new global checklists for decapod suborder Dendrobranchiata and infraorders Anomura & Caridea; mite superfamilies Canestrinioidea, Hemisarcoptoidea, Histiostomatoidea, Schizoglyphoidea (order Sarcoptiformes), Adamystoidea & Pomerantzioidea (order Trombidiformes), Ascoidea and families Parholaspididae, Podocinidae (order Mesostigmata), plus families Ologamasidae & Rhodacaridae (Mesostigmata) as a replacement for two Mites GSDs from Brazil
LWS fleas: Robert E. Lewis World Species Flea (Siphonaptera) List replaced Parhost World Database of Fleas
Sesiidae (Lepidoptera)
Tortricid.net: World Catalogue of the Tortricidae
WOL: The World Odonata List replaced Global Species Database of Odonata

101 checklists have been updated in a year cycle:

3i Auchenorrhyncha (8 updates)
3i Curculio (2 updates)
Collembola.org
Eumycetozoa.com
Gelechiidae (5 updates)
Global Lepidoptera Index (GLI) (4 updates)
ITIS (10 updates)
Pterophoroidea (4 updates)
Scarabs (10 updates)
SF Aphid
SF Chrysididae
SF Cockroach
SF Coleorrhyncha
SF Coreoidea
SF Dermaptera
SF Embioptera
SF Grylloblattodea
SF Isoptera (6 updates)
SF Lygaeoidea
SF Mantodea
SF Mantophasmatodea
SF Orthoptera
SF Phasmida
SF Plecoptera
SF Plecoptera
SF Psocodea
SF Zoraptera
Species Fungorum Plus
StaphBase
Systema Dipterorum (2 updates)
The Scorpion Files
ThripsWiki
WCO (Opiliones) (6 updates)
World Checklist of Vascular Plants (Flowering Plants)
World Ferns (4 updates)
World Plants (4 updates)
WoRMS, 65 checklists (10 updates)
World Wide Wattle (WWW) (2 updates)

Other changes:

SF Cockroach was removed from the Catalogue of Life in June 2023