Purpose and Overview of the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS)

Purpose:
The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) is a partnership of U.S., Canadian, and Mexican agencies, other organizations, and taxonomic specialists cooperating on the development of an on-line, scientifically credible, list of biological names focusing on the biota of North America.

Overview:
The White House Subcommittee on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics has identified systematics as a research priority that is fundamental to ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. This primary need identified by the Subcommittee requires improvements in the organization of, and access to, standardized nomenclature. ITIS (Integrated Taxonomic Information System) was designed to fulfill these requirements. In the future, the ITIS will provide taxonomic data and a directory of taxonomic expertise that will support the system.

The systems development portion of the project is organized in to three main efforts:

• ITIS Online, a web-enabled access to the ITIS database
• The ITIS Taxonomic Workbench (TWB), a tool to input, edit, and manage ITIS data
• ITIS Data management.