May 9, 2012

Each year the Clements Checklist releases an annual revision; this revision incorporates updates and corrections to all of the data contained in the Clements Checklist, such as the taxonomy and nomenclature of species, subspecies, families and orders, and the geographic ranges of species and subspecies. The last update was released in August 2011, and we anticipate that the next update will be in August 2012.

Last August we also suggested that we would release an update early in 2012, which would "include changes only to the nomenclature of subspecies, to the ranges of species and subspecies, and corrections to typographic errors," and would "not include changes at the level of the species or higher (so, no splits or lumps, etc.)."

That seemed like a good idea at the time, but early 2012 has come and gone, and now we are fully focused on the annual updates and corrections. So, there will be no updates to the Clements Checklist until the August release.

We do have some corrections to make to the online Updates and Corrections pages of August 23 2011, however.

Under "HIGHER LEVEL TAXONOMY" we released a list of the 227 families accepted by Clements Checklist, with the names of newly recognized families in bold, with an additional extinct family listed in brackets. There are two problems with this list. The first problem is that we provided a list only of the formal (scientific) names of each family, and did not provide the corresponding English names for the families. So, no errors here, but this was inconsiderate on our part. Below is a revised list of these families, with both scientific and English names.

There was a real problem with the list that we provided, however, and that is that the sequence of families on the Updates and Corrections page was incorrect for the series of families between Phaethonidae and Cathartidae. So, the complete list of families in Clements Checklist 6.6 (August 2011), in the proper sequence, with the scientific and English names, is:

• August 23, 2011

• February 16, 2011

• December 18, 2009
  

• December 15, 2008

• October 8, 2007 

• July 18, 2007