Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera

The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG) is a taxonomic database that collects and organizes names of groups of living things called genera. It includes names from many areas of life, covering time from 1758 for animals and 1753 for plants up to today. All these names are placed in a clear order, making it easier for scientists and others to study biodiversity.

As of July 2024, IRMNG holds more than 500,000 published genus names, with over 1.7 million species names listed—about 1.3 million of which are considered the main or “accepted” names. While the species names are not updated as often, the genus names are kept current.

You can search IRMNG online to find the newest data, and it is also shared in regular updates for use in other systems. The database began in 2006 at the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia and has been cared for by the Flanders Marine Institute in Belgium since 2016. It helps scientists around the world study and understand the many different kinds of life on Earth.

Description

The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG) is a database that stores scientific names of groups of plants, animals, and other living things. It includes over 500,000 names of groups called genera and more than 1.7 million names of species. These names come from many different sources and are organized in a special way to help scientists and others study biodiversity.

IRMNG helps people look up the latest information about these names online. It also provides data that can be downloaded for use in other projects. The database includes details about where these groups live and whether they are still alive today or only exist as fossils. It follows special rules for naming different types of living things, making it a useful tool for research.

Database location and hosting

The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera was started and designed by an Australian biologist named Tony Rees in 2006. In 2014, he received a special award called the Ebbe Nielsen Prize for his work. From 2006 to 2014, the database was kept at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. Then, between 2014 and 2016, it moved to the Flanders Marine Institute. Since 2016, the database has been available on its website, www.irmng.org, which is hosted by the Flanders Marine Institute. This institute also hosts another database called the World Register of Marine Species.

IRMNG usage

Information from IRMNG is used by many big projects that study all kinds of living things. These include the Open Tree of Life, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). It is also used by projects like the Atlas of Living Australia and the Global Names Architecture (GNA)'s Global Names Resolver. Since 2018, IRMNG data has helped fill in details about many small organisms and plant-like algae in the Catalogue of Life. This includes groups like Protozoa, Chromista, Charophyta, Chlorophyta, Glaucophyta, and Rhodophyta.