Moving from modern toward post-modern science: comment on “An integrated assessment of the vascular plants of the Americas”

Abstract

Recently Ulloa Ulloa et al. (2017) published a 2600-page online checklist of the New World vascular plants (the Checklist hereafter) that includes 124,993 species, 6227 genera, and 355 families associated with incomplete elementary taxonomy as well as with the distributional data provided for every species (Ulloa Ulloa et al., 2017). Givnish (2017) heralds their publically searchable database as “… a monumental achievement that will be of enormous interest to conservation biologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, biogeographers, land managers, and governmental officials around the world” (Givnish, 2017: 1535). Although land managers and governmental officials may indeed find the massive new Checklist useful, its utility for scientific pursuits so far is less obvious.