The CATE Project

CATE stands for Creating a Taxonomic e-Science and is a project funded by the United Kingdom's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) under its e-science initiative. The particular goal of CATE is to test the feasibility of creating a web-based, consensus taxonomy using two model groups, one from the plant and the other from the animal kingdom. The wider aim is to explore practically the idea of 'unitary' taxonomy (see below) and promote web-based revisions as a source of authoritative information about groups of organisms for specialist and non-specialist users.

The project team is from a consortium composed of the Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the University of Oxford. Kew's major collaborator for the providing taxonomic information on the Araceae is Dr Thomas B Croat and his Araceae research centre at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, USA.

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