Fauna Europaea: Gastrotricha

By

Balsamo, Maria
De Jong, Yde
D'hondt, Jean Loup
Kisielewski, Jacek
Todaro, M. Antonio
Tongiorgi, Paolo
Guidi, Loretta
Grilli, Paolo

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2015-08-14

Original Publication

Biodiversity data journal

Volume

3

Pages

1--23

Subjects

Biodiversity , biodiversity informatics , Europe , Fauna Europaea , fresh waters , Gastrotricha , Taxonomic indexing , taxonomy , Zoology

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia Pensoft Publishers [2013]-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.3.e5800
eLocator: e5800

 

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.<br>Gastrotricha are a meiobenthic phylum composed of 813 species known so far (2 orders, 17 families) of free-living microinvertebrates commonly present and actively moving on and into sediments of aquatic ecosystems, 339 of which live in fresh and brackish waters. The Fauna Europaea database includes 214 species of Chaetonotida (4 families) plus a single species of Macrodasyida incertae sedis. This paper deals with the 224 European freshwater species known so far, 9 of which, all of Chaetonotida, have been described subsequently and will be included in the next database version. Basic information on their biology and ecology are summarized, and a list of selected, main references is given. As a general conclusion the gastrotrich fauna from Europe is the best known compared with that of other continents, but shows some important gaps of knowledge in Eastern and Southern regions.