A little over a year ago, in August, 2014, the HBW Alive Editorial team faced an important challenge: BirdLife International and Lynx Edicions had just published together
HBW and Birdlife International Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World Volume 1: Non-passerines (del Hoyo & Collar 2014), with a large number of taxonomical modifications which had to be incorporated into
HBW Alive. In the more than twenty years it took to complete the monumental
Handbook of the Birds of the World (1992-2013), there had been a scientific revolution in terms of our conception of the evolution of birds, as much in the understanding of the precise relationships between orders and families as in the delimitation of the advances in the process of speciation among sister taxa. Suffice it to say that the
HBW-BL Illustrated Checklist includes 2,126 bibliographical references, most from recent years, so the necessary changes were very numerous.
For
HBW Alive, the task of adapting the contents to the new taxonomic sequence was, thanks to information technology, simple and rapid. However the changes arising from the recognition or not of new species was to prove a far greater task. 462 new species appeared almost overnight, the result of splits, whose internet texts only contained the fields corresponding to taxonomy and distribution, with no information about biology, ecology or conservation status, and which lacked links to photos, videos or sound recordings. Moreover the texts of the "old" species, which before included those now recognized as different, had to be modified accordingly. By the same token particular attention had to be paid to the 30 cases in which the
HBW-BL Illustrated Checklist suggested lumping forms that were previously considered distinct species.
When modifying the texts of the two or more species resulting from a particular split, there were sometimes considerable difficulties attributing to certain taxa the information in the original text relating to details like, for example, diet, nest construction or the migration calendar, which effectively obliged the editors to carry out new investigative work. Even the assignment of the bibliography to one or another species sometimes required a considerable amount of work. Given the relatively small size of the editorial team – it is to be hoped that an increase in subscriptions will permit us to increase this in the future – we had no choice but to dedicate all our efforts to the new task, leaving aside for the moment, with some exceptions, the routine updating of the species accounts of the rest of the species.
We are pleased finally to be able to announce to our readers that the process has been successfully completed and that all the species in
HBW Alive now have their own complete, individual texts. We are very grateful to the various editors, and especially to Guy Kirwan, for their efforts, which have permitted this to be achieved within a reasonable time frame. Within a year, the publication of the
HBW-BL Illustrated Checklist volume devoted to the passerines will raise another mountain of work before us. By then, though, we hope to have advanced substantially the updating of the texts of many other species.
), and the new species is then accepted without question by IUCN (and the conservation world), and permanently enshrined and illustrated in a stunning globally-distributed book by Lynx Edicions! It doesn't seem entirely fair or balanced to me...
