WoRMS

History

WoRMS was founded in 2007 and grew out of the European Register of Marine Species which incorporated the UNESCO-IOC Register of Marine Organisms (URMO) compiled by Jacob van der Land and colleagues at the National Museum of Natural History, Leiden. It is primarily funded by the European Union and hosted by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Ostend, Belgium. WoRMS has established formal agreements with several other biodiversity projects, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Encyclopedia of Life. In 2008, WoRMS stated that it hoped to have an up-to-date record of all marine species completed by 2010, the year in which the Census of Marine Life was completed. In 2012, the editors published a synthesis of how many species have been named, and yet to be named based on the numbers of species in 100 studies that could not be named, a statistical model based on rates of species description and expert opinion; together indicating suggesting about one third of marine species remained to be named . A subequent study noted that most expert opinions agreed with the statistical model predictions , indicating about 0.3 million marine species may exist (accounting for synonyms), and the one-third of species remaining to be named is consistent with other taxa.