All biodiversity information systems use the names of organisms as a fundamental identifier. Names provide the essential vocabulary by which we discover, index, manage, and share information relating to biodiversity. Access to an authoritative list of names and their relationships to species (taxa) is key to supporting information management and sharing across the conservation, biosecurity, and biotechnology sectors.

There is currently no single, definitive registry of the over 100,000 organism names relevant to New Zealand. Because of this many agencies currently each maintain their own lists of taxonomic names in isolation from each other, in different formats, and at different levels of depth and quality. The absence of a definitive source of taxonomic names means that resources are wasted through duplication of effort, there is increased expense to end-users in having to access multiple sources, and increased risk of confused decision making.
The New Zealand Organisms Register (NZOR) is a project to address this issue. The vision, developed by a multi-agency steering group established in 2006, for the project is:


Based on this vision NZOR comprises three key elements:

• The data providers
• The technical infrastructure
• The end users

However, the core of NZOR will be the technical infrastructure for:

• aggregating appropriate taxonomic data from distributed data providers who actively curate and maintain the quality of that data.
• integrating that data into a single national repository
• providing a range of web and technical data services on that repository to facilitate:
• easy evaluation of the correct name for a species and the evidence for its presence in New Zealand
• the integration of that data into local systems
• maintenance of  the currency of that local data
• easy checking of data quality and accuracy of submitted species lists
• feedback directly to the experts who maintain that data

In addition to New Zealand based data providers NZOR will have the ability to consume taxonomic data from international sources to ensure we have the most complete coverage we can achieve.  Landcare Research is a partner in a new EU Framework 7 program (4D4Life), managed by Species2000, and funded to support the completion of the global Catalogue of Life through an international network of regional data providers. NZOR is the proposed regional provider for New Zealand. Species 2000 aggregates taxonomic data from many global taxonomic databases and already maintains some taxonomic information for 1.2 million organisms, or about half of those so far described. The development of an international network of regional data providers will complete the task.

A more detailed description of the original proposal for NZOR may be found in the scoping document: What’s in a name, Carver et al, 2007

A Glossary of NZOR related terms can be found here.