Commissioners
Professor Philippe Bouchet
Overview:
Philippe Bouchet is a malacologist whose interests are with the exploration and description of biodiversity, especially marine invertebrates.
His research on vertical migrations of gastropod larvae between the abyss and the surface awarded him the 2001 Marine Sciences Prize of the French Academy of Sciences. Exploring for unknown faunas has taken him to expeditions in three oceans, as well as to a number of remote islands, with emphasis on the western Pacific, where he has coordinated several major international expeditions that have become the gold standard of biodiversity surveys, and have rallied the forces of as many as 80 scientists from 19 different countries working together to change our perspectives on marine megabiodiversity, attracting attention of the public, policy makers and scientists alike (see e.g. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 75:4, The Independent Feb 07, MSNBC).
Bouchet's recent work focuses on species richness in complex tropical coastal environments, adressing issues such as rarity, spatial heterogeneity and endemism. Bouchet believes in solid taxonomical work. He has authored major monographs and described over 500 new species of molluscs. He is also editor of several volumes in the Tropical Deep-Sea Benthos series. In 2005 he published with J.-P. Rocroi a "Classification and Nomenclator of gastropod families" (Malacologia 47: 1-2), in which about 2400 Recent and fossil gastropods family-group names are listed with full bibliographical reference and nomenclatural data, together with a working classification.
Philippe Bouchet is senior professor at the French National Muséum of Natural History, in Paris. He is active in his museum's visiting curators programmes, and in several European Union programmes to produce continent-wide authority lists.
He has been as a member of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature since 1990.
Contact details:
MNHN / CP51
57 rue Cuvier, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
Tel. +33 1 40 79 31 03
pbouchet (at) mnhn (dot) fr
