The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is pleased to announce funding from the Census of Marine Life (CoML) Synthesis group at Memorial University to help complete draft species lists for gaps in taxon coverage in WoRMS.

Two grants have been provided for gap projects, led by Prof Geoff Boxshall and Prof Philippe Bouchet with the support of the data management team at VLIZ. CoML and WoRMS share common interests and membership amongst their communities, including the goal of making authoritative knowledge on marine species freely accessible on the internet. There is substantial and growing synergy between the work of CoML and WoRMS. To date, CoML led an exceptionally well-distributed world press release that announced the establishment of WoRMS [http://www.marinespecies.org/news.php?p=show&id=357]. CoML intends to deliver a comprehensive list of the world's marine species in October 2010, and will achieve this through the support of WoRMS and its supporting organisations; including the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) and Society for the Management of Electronic Biodiversity Data (www.SMEBD.eu).

WoRMS recognises the importance of the CoML community as users of WoRMS, and is contributing its content as a quality control tool for OBIS, EoL and CBOL (amongst many others, see our user page) .

Many of the WoRMS taxonomic editors have been associated with the Census over the past ten years. It also provides a metric for what is known about marine biodiversity that will form part of the synthesis when the Census concludes its work in 2010. A common interest of CoML and WoRMS is to arrive at a comprehensive but rigorous estimate what is known and unknown about marine biodiversity, including what species are described and yet to be described, so this will be a priority focus for WoRMS contributors during 2010. CoML and WoRMS are cooperating to achieve their common goal of inventorying all described marine species by the end of 2010. Thus WoRMS is recognised as an affiliated project by CoML, and WoRMS provides statistics on marine species to CoML.