Nomenclatural benchmarking: the roles of digital typification and telemicroscopy.

Nomenclatural benchmarking is the periodic realignment of species names with species theories and is necessary for the accurate and uniform use of Linnaean binominals in the face of changing species limits. Gaining access to types, often for little more than a cursory examination by an expert, is a major bottleneck in the advance and availability of biodiversity informatics. For the nearly two million described species it has been estimated that five to six million name-bearing type specimens exist, including those for synonymized binominals.