FIGURE 1 in To name or not to name: Criteria to promote economy of change in Linnaean classification schemes

FIGURE 1. Changes of genus-level taxonomy summarized for European amphibians and reptiles. The graph shows the percentage of species that changed genus from one monographic work to the other, standardized per year. After a rather continuous rate of change from 1834–1978, almost no genus-level changes occured between 1978 and 1997, whereas in the 1997–2010 period the increase was higher than ever before. Black bars indicate values for all pairwise comparisons between the taxon lists of the respective monographs, gray bars show the same trend only for those taxa that already were included in the very first works by Duméril and Bibron and/or Boulenger (with an overall lower rate of change since these early described species comprise several type species of well established genera). Species lists were extracted from the following publications: Duméril and Bibron (1834–1854); Boulenger (1882a,b, 1885a,b, 1887, 1889, 1896a,b); Schreiber (1912); Hellmich (1962); Arnold and Burton (1978); Gasc (1997); Speybroeck et al. (2010).