- Data source
- Input directly
The earliest progenitor of ITIS was the Taxonomic Code for the Biota of Chesapeake Bay (Schwarz et al., 1972) https://doi.org/10.21220/V57F1D, one of the first digitized taxonomic information systems. Other projects were inspired by this work, including the Alaska Species Code to manage biological data for the Alaskan Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program (Engelmann, 1979) https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892900002964 which used numeric identifiers but ones that were that were different from the the Taxonomic Code for the Biota of Chesapeake Bay. To form a list that could assign taxonomic codes to all taxa a new taxonomic coding system was developed and personnel from the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) began adding taxa into the new framework, and published the first edition of the NODC Taxonomic Code in 1977, containing approximately 16,000 scientific names. Subsequent printed versions of the NODC Taxonomic Code were published up to 1984 reaching a volume of approximately 45,000 scientific names. After 1984 only digital versions were provided, and culminated with Version 8 of the taxonomic code containing 208,458 scientific names.
Volume 8 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/metadata/landing-page/bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.nodc:0050418 served as a bridge between the NODC Taxonomic Code and ITIS. On June 13, 1996, the ITIS database was initiated and populated with NODC data. The data development and quality assurance strategy since then has be adding new names and reviewing and verifying the NODC data by working with data stewards and experts from around the world. Since the 1996 import of NODC Volume 8, ITIS has grown to nearly 857,000 scientific names. And more than 90% of the original NODC data has been verified and brought to ITIS quality standards, leaving about 89,000 names as unverified from NODC.
