Linnaeus apparently trumps internet popularity measures. I needed some easy visual depictions of bird taxonomy and suddenly found that things I had known to work no longer did. ManyEyes told me that my browser had an outdated Java VM. Updating it led to an error claiming that my security settings were too stringent (the dataset exists). Then I found Tableau Public.
For the data, I went to the IOC worldbird names list (4.2) and downloaded the XLS file. I deleted the blank lines, the genus lines and retained only the subspecies for polytypic forms and the main species line for those that were monotypic. I then took the author column, removed the brackets, split it so that the year went to another field and then I was able to quickly produce a few visuals. Note however that this depicts the authors of the names and that usually refers to the author who described the species. There are exceptions such as when old names are resurrected from synonymy after a split or when replacement names are created with or without circumscription changes.
An interactive version (updated 9 July 2014)
An interactive version (updated 9 July 2014)
Here are a few snapshots that look interesting. Remember that this is species/subspecies (genus descriptions are not included).
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| The biggest bird namers |
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| The big bird namers by decade |
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| The big namers in the biggest decades using a treemap |
If species distributions are included, it might make for some more interesting views. It would likely show how the dominant contributions move from Asia to Africa and then to the New World tropics.
PS: There is definitely a login related problem on Tableau Public. It works intermittently so success perhaps depends on the load on the web-server.
