Nymphalidae Forum

As we have been setting up this scratchpad, I have had to think hard about the usefulness of such a site. We now have an abundance of web sites with essentially the same information, ie repetition galore. My own thinking is starting to go along these lines: we have the Tree of Life pages (http://tolweb.org) as an excellent place to store information about phylogenetic relationships of taxa (including Nymphalidae). We have the newly inaugurated Encyclopedia of Life (http://www.eol.org) as a potential place for species pages. We have an incredibly comprehensive site for butterfly taxonomy on Markku Savela's site (http://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/bio/life/insecta/lepidoptera/ditrysia/papili...) which lists just about all names under taxa according to available published information. What we don't have is a place for us Nymphalidae specialists to discuss recent results in systematics and their implications on the classification of Nymphalidae. That could be the function of this scratchpad! Since I have been heavily involved in figuring out the higher level phylogeny of Nymphalidae, I have thought a lot about how to divide the family into subfamilies, tribes and genera. However, I have to admit that I have done this more or less alone in my own (twisted?) mind. I believe it is now time to get all of us working on the systematics of Nymphalidae to talk to each other about results and their implications on the classification. We are on the verge of having a stable classification for the whole family down to genus level, but if we keep on doing our own thing (as we do now), then we will never get to that stable consensus classification. Having an e-mail list for discussion is too elitist in my opinion, this discussion has to be public. So I throw out a challenge to all of us overworked nymphalid systematists: here we have a public forum for discussing the classification of Nymphalidae, will YOU be an active member?!