The CBR Checklist of Birds of China V1.2
2010-12-13
https://sites.google.com/site/cbrchinabirdlist/
Lu Dong1*, Jinyu Lei2, Yang Liu3 and Qian Wei4
1. College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, email: tiantai_bird@yahoo.cn;
2. World Wild Fund, China Programme, Wuhan Office, Wuhan, China, email: eduptarmigan@yahoo.com;
3. Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern, Switzerland, China, email: yangliubnu@gmail.com;
4. China Bird Watch editor, Chengdu, China, email: baozou2006@gmail.com
China is home to vast and spectacular bird life. Since 2000, the number of Chinese birdwatchers has been thriving and the local birdwatching organizations retain proliferative. Increasing numbers of birdwatchers in Europe and North America have also been attracted by diverse avifauna in this country. The past ten years have been marked by increasing and continual taxonomic changes largely based on phylogenetic studies in birds. It therefore presented necessary to establish a comprehensive national bird checklist. In fact, there have been a few extant national checklists published in recent years. However, none of them tends to follow up-to-date taxonomic changes. Some of them even ignore numerous new records of birds that have been convincingly observed in the field by birdwatchers. The lack of such fundamental material makes the constant information-exchange regarding to taxonomy and distribution in this country ambiguous and incomplete.
In this arena of taxonomic “splits”, the CBR checklist of birds of China presents the most up-to-date information of bird species that have been recorded in China. The new checklist covers1417 species of birds recognized by the scientific and birdwatching communities. It incorporates hundreds of new discoveries, vagrants and new taxonomic changes. It provides the scientific, English and Chinese names of each species for Chinese and International readers. In this checklist, the taxonomies, sequence and nomenclature followed IOC World Bird Name with a few modifications. Same as the IOC Checklist, the present CBR checklist is published online and will be updated regularly and it is used as the official Chinese checklist for the future series publication of China Bird Report.
We hope the readers will enjoy using this checklist for their birdwatching in China. We would be very pleased to receive any contribution and comments on improving this checklist for the future.
