The World Odonata List

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Description

The World Odonata List (WOL) is being managed in TaxonWorks by a the team of Odonata authorities (Dennis Paulson, Martin Schorr, John Abbott, Cornelio Bota-Sierra, Cyrille Deliry, Klaas-Douwe Dijkstra, Federico Lozano). TaxonWorks is an online workbench for taxonomy. It includes all synonyms for all species (but not the genera yet) that we have been able to confirm. We consider the list a good starting point for estimates of biodiversity in this insect order. Our goal is to continuously add information to this list that will be of value to the odonate community. The list is available to anyone through API calls and we encourage administrators of websites who rely on up-to-date odonate taxonomy to take advantage of this. If you would like to learn how to access the list via API calls for your site, please contact John Abbott (jabbott1@ua.edu). The nomenclatural basis for this list is Bridges (1993). The classification is based on three recent publications, Dijkstra et al. (2013), Dijkstra et al. (2014) and Bybee et al. (2021) (see also Appendix B from that publication). We have not recognized any subspecies of Odonata. Instead, we have listed all named subspecies as synonyms of the species under which they were named. We are not able to judge the validity of these subspecies, and as many of them have been questioned, we chose to treat them all in the same fashion. The families are in phylogenetic order (i.e. the smaller sister-group is listed first), except in Calopterygoidea as both that superfamily and the relationships within it are too poorly resolved (Bybee et al. 2021). The genera and species are in alphabetical order within the family. The original genus, when differing from a species' current placement, is listed in square brackets after the species name.

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