Caucasian Arachnology
The first introduction on Caucasian arachnology by Marusik et al. (2005) shed a first light on the more than 140 years old history of Caucasian arachnology, distinguishing four phases of research: (1) beginning research (1866-1938), (2) pre-Dunin (1939-1978), (3) Dunin (1979-1998) and (4) modern (1999-today). Today I provide some more information on the intensity of spider research in the Caucasus - measured in number of publications per decade.
Based on the bibliography more than 200 articles concerning Caucasian spiders have so far been published. I think I didn’t miss many. In the beginning phase of Caucasian arachnology only ten articles were published between 1866 and 1929. In the next - pre-Dunin - phase a peak can be observed between 1930 and 1949 - based mostly on the efforts of Dmitri Charitionov, Sergei Spassky and Tamara Mkheidze. Starting with a setback in publication numbers in the 1950s - and including the Dunin- and modern phase of Caucasian arachnology a steady and strong increase in research effort on Caucasian spiders can be observed.
One can also see in the graph that this trend of increasing research hardly slowed down in recent years as publication numbers still increased from 2000 to 2007. Today we live in the most productive phase of Caucasian arachnology ever - based on the sheer number of articles.
It would be most interesting to include the numbers of known Caucasian species per decade as well as the number of species described as new species from the Caucasus per decade as well. Based on such data we might be able to make some educated guesses on the number of spider species in the Caucasus. I hope to be able to do so when we finished migration to the new Ontowiki content management system in April …
